


running from a beast

by hopeboos



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Action, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Blood and Violence, Destruction, Earthquakes, Empath, Explosions, Fights, Gen, Healers, Hurt/Comfort, Illusions, M/M, Mind Control, Multi, OT23 (NCT), On the Run, Parallel Universes, Precognition, Rescue Missions, Shapeshifting, Strength, Superpowers, Team Fluff, Team as Family, Technopathy, Telepathy, Teleportation, Temporary Character Death, hiding from the evil government with ur buddies, mentioned Human Experimentation, super speed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:07:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 66,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28479645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hopeboos/pseuds/hopeboos
Summary: In a second, Taeyong teleports into the space in front of the window to block Sungchan’s path. Sungchan sees him at the last moment, skidding to a stop in the middle of the room.“Let’s not do this, please,” Taeyong says, hands held up in front of him. “We don’t have the time, unless you want to go back to that place.”“I’m not going with you,” Sungchan says, gritting his teeth and throwing another quake his way. The air is punched right out of Taeyong as he goes flying backwards, his bodyweight shattering the window behind him—and he topples right out of it, tipping over the low window ledge as glass rains down around him.orThey need to keep a low profile, stay hidden from the people who want them for their abilities. But they desperately want to get their friends to safety.
Relationships: Chittaphon Leechaiyapornkul | Ten/Liu Yang Yang, Everyone & Everyone, Huang Ren Jun/Lee Jeno/Na Jaemin, Jung Sungchan & Jung Yoonoh | Jaehyun, Liu Yang Yang & Qian Kun, Na Jaemin & Park Jisung, and poly 94/95s/96s minus ten
Comments: 103
Kudos: 345





	1. Taeyong

**Author's Note:**

> i properly got into nct over the summer thanks to the large amount of nct fics under the kpop>superpowers tag feeding me when i needed it, so i guess this is me giving back! hope u enjoy <3
> 
> title from superm's monster

They warp into a road three streets away from their target building, by the back door of the café Taeyong used to work in. That job feels like several lives ago now, but the peeling yellow paint is still the same as it ever was. It’s a risky move to be here, because he knows there could easily be workers inside who know him, but time is of the essence. They need to be the first ones to reach this kid.

“This way,” he tells Jungwoo, keeping his voice low and a firm grip on his hand as he leads him down the alleyway. “Head down.”

Jungwoo follows, obedient, cap low over his eyes. Taeyong pulls his own on tighter, face mask secured in place as they pass by the café windows at a casual walk. When they emerge out onto the street, Jungwoo pulls his hand away, and they speed up to a brisker walk together.

“What’s the plan here?” Jungwoo asks, once they’re safely down the road. “What are you going to tell him?”

“The truth.” He turns sharply into a new street. “The short version, I suppose. Whatever will convince him to come with us, or at least let us get him away from here. We can’t let them get to him.”

“It’s hard to trust strangers, though, and especially strangers like us. Do we have a backup plan if he refuses?”

“You’re the backup plan. We’ll round him up and haul him away if we have to,” he says, shooting Jungwoo a smile. The motel they’re looking for comes into view between the row of buildings in front of them, innocuous and old. “Did you think I just brought you because you’re cute?”

“Yes. And because of my lovable personality,” Jungwoo says, completely seriously. “I’m not going to drag him anywhere he doesn’t want to go.”

“We’re not dragging him anywhere. But if we have to pull him out of danger, we will. Understood?”

Jungwoo nods, following Taeyong down a small side road. “I know. But I don’t have to like it.”

“We’ll do what we can,” he says, slowing down at they come up to the building. “Safety first, always. Looking out for ourselves and others, including this kid. Right?”

“Right,” Jungwoo agrees, uncharacteristically twitchy. No one likes going out on a mission, especially not one organised so hastily, but Jungwoo has always been anxious about showing his face in public. He says it’s because he’s the cutest and thus the most recognisable among them, other than maybe Mark.

“In and out. We’ll be fine.” They can’t waste any more time. Taeyong reaches out to pull the motel door open, keeping his head down as they walk through the lobby.

“Hey,” the man behind the counter calls after them. “You got a room?”

“Yes, sir,” he says, without looking at him. The door inside the lobby leading to the rest of the building is secured by a key card lock, but there’s a handy window set in the middle of it, giving him a view into the corridor beyond.

“Sure about that?” the guy asks, leering over the counter at them. “If you have friends here, they have to come and let you in.”

“That won’t be a problem,” he says, turning to Jungwoo. “Will you take care of this?”

“Do I have to?”

“It’ll buy us more time. They’ll bring in an armada if they hear that we’re here, too.”

Jungwoo wrinkles his nose. “Fine.”

There’s a whoosh of air as Jungwoo speeds away, the blur of his figure zipping around the room, from the desk to the chair and back. The force of it sends a few papers flying off the front desk, and then he’s back at Taeyong’s side barely ten seconds later, hair tousled and face displeased. Taeyong turns to see the man sat under the desk, frozen in fear, hands and legs tied up with several yards worth of sticky tape. He’s gagged by what seems to be his own bandana, but it doesn’t stop him from trying to shout around it, eyes goggling at them.

“Thank you,” he says, offering his hand to Jungwoo, who takes it without question.

“Let’s just get this over with.”

Taeyong turns back to the window, focusing on a spot further down the corridor. A familiar thrum overtakes his body, flooding his nerves and snapping them both further into the building, right at the spot he’d been targeting.

“Hendery said he’s in room 205. That’s bound to be on the second floor,” Jungwoo says, pulling away again to start up the stairs, Taeyong hot on his heels. The motel is unnervingly quiet around them as they run up the staircase together, scanning the room numbers as they pass by.

205 is at the end of the corridor, facing the street they’d first come down. Jungwoo looks at him, face thin under the sallow lightbulb, and Taeyong looks back, pulling his facemask down before knocking on the door.

There’s no sound from inside at first. So he knocks again, and calls out, “Jung Sungchan? You don’t know us, but we’ve come to help you.”

There’s movement, then, quick footsteps on old floorboards, but no vocal response.

“It’s alright, we’re friends,” he tries again. “My name is Taeyong, and I escaped the labs before, too. We’re on the same side.”

The sound of a window scraping open rings through to the corridor, and Taeyong immediately steps back, gesturing to the door. Jungwoo takes initiative quickly, backing up into the hallway before he disappears in a whoosh of air. There’s a loud crack as the door breaks against the force of Jungwoo’s run, wood and plastic scattering in the hallway after him. Jungwoo whips back to Taeyong’s side after only a second, gripping a tall boy by his bicep and the back of his neck. Sungchan stares at Taeyong, eyes shining with fear, and Jungwoo releases his hold on him, stepping a safe distance back.

“It’s okay,” Taeyong says again, holding up placating hands. “Do you recognise me? We’re not here to hurt you.”

“Of course I do,” Sungchan says, eyes flitting between Taeyong and the open window in his room. With Taeyong in front of him and Jungwoo behind, he looks like a trapped animal, skittish and dangerous. “Lee Taeyong. You’re exactly who they’d send.”

“I’m not with SM,” he says again. “I haven’t been for nearly a year, now. We’ve come to help you get away from them.”

Sungchan looks back at Jungwoo, who is watching the exchange with a stony expression. Taeyong can see the concern in his eyes, and anxiety in his posture. He’s right; they need to get out of here as soon as possible.

“How did you find me?”

“The receptionist called the police when you checked in, and SM are coming here, right now. We’ve been keeping an eye on the reports to make sure we could get there first in a situation like this. In case someone like us needed our help.” He lays his hands out flat, offering them to Sungchan. “And here we are. But we haven’t got much time. If you want to get away from them, you need to come with us now.”

Sungchan eyes his palms before glancing inside his room again. “I was doing just fine before you came.”

“You can’t outrun them. You can’t outfight the weapons they’ll bring to subdue you, not on your own. Trust me. I can get us far away.”

“Far away?” he asks, hands trembling, fists balled like he’s preparing to fight. “Or straight to them?”

“Sungchan—” Jungwoo starts to speak, but before he can finish the word, Sungchan spins on his heels and splays out his hands in Jungwoo’s direction. The air rumbles with an unseen force, and the ground beneath them shakes as Sungchan’s ability throws Jungwoo down the corridor, straight into the far wall. The vibrations that spread out from him make Taeyong topple over backwards too, clutching at the ground as it shakes beneath them. The quakes die out as quickly as they’d come, and he looks up to see Sungchan dashing his way through the empty motel room, aiming for the open window.

In a second, Taeyong teleports into the space in front of the window to block Sungchan’s path. Sungchan sees him at the last moment, skidding to a stop in the middle of the room.

“Let’s not do this, please,” Taeyong says, hands held up in front of him. “We don’t have the time, unless you want to go back to that place.”

“I’m not going with you,” Sungchan says, gritting his teeth and throwing another quake his way. The air is punched right out of Taeyong as he goes flying backwards, his bodyweight shattering the window behind him—and he topples right out of it, tipping over the low window ledge as glass rains down around him.

He’s barely begun to fall before he thinks of the yellow-lit corridor, materialising there beside Jungwoo again, who’s just getting to his feet. Taeyong turns to look back in the room, and Sungchan is looking right back at him, hopped up onto the window ledge. Their eyes meet for only a moment before he jumps out too, using a quake to break his fall, rattling the whole building as he lands. Then comes the tell-tale noise of fast footsteps echoing down the alleyway, headed towards the main road.

“Ow,” Jungwoo groans, rubbing the back of his head as he stands up straight. He looks at Taeyong, eyebrows raised, one hand reaching out for him. “In and out, huh?”

Taeyong takes it without a word, body pulled taut as he teleports them both into the street they came down only minutes ago. Sungchan is emerging from the alleyway in front of them, and Jungwoo speeds away from Taeyong, snapping back to put Sungchan between them again.

“Listen to me,” Taeyong says, taking him by the shoulders. “We have to go, right now.”

“How do I know you’re not with them?” Sungchan says, voice rising with fear, backpack clutched in his arms. Several passers-by have stopped to stare.

“If we were, would he be asking so nicely?” Jungwoo says, looking around restlessly. “Come on, man. You’ve got to give us something, here.”

Sungchan blinks, head jerking to the side. “There’s a truck approaching,” he says, fingers twitching. “A big one. I can feel it. That’s them, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Taeyong says, imploring. “Take my hand, and we’ll get you away from here. Okay?”

He holds both hands out, and Jungwoo steps around Sungchan to grasp one. Sungchan looks down at the one offered his way, jaw clenching. If he can sense their vehicles approaching, he must know now that he can’t outrun them. He must realise that the stranger offering him a hand is his best shot of getting away from here.

Sungchan clutches his bag to his chest, takes in a breath, and grabs Taeyong’s hand firmly. As soon as they’re connected, Taeyong grips him back tight, and pictures the beach hut where he’d had his first kiss. They’re pulled from the ground together, and in their last fraction of permanence, he can see the giant plain truck turning into the road ahead of them.

They re-emerge in the empty beach hut, small and stuffy with stale air. The three of them barely have enough space to stand next to each other, the door bolted shut, only slivers of dim light reaching in through the cracks. He wonders if Taeil’s family still own this particular hut, or if they’ve had to let it go. Things have been hard for them all for the past two years.

Sungchan jolts, full bodied, backing up away from them until he hits the wall. Taeyong is just thankful he doesn’t immediately blast the wood away. “Where are we?”

“A beach hut on Jeju’s busiest tourist beach, so don’t talk too loudly.”

“Why here?” Jungwoo questions, steadying himself with a hand against the wall.

“Holidayed here once,” he says, inhaling the smell of sand and old wood. “It’s a good in-between place.”

Sungchan’s breaths are coming fast and heavy, and even in the dim room, Taeyong can tell he’s tensed to bolt at any second. “Why? Why did you bring me here?”

“I meant what I said,” Taeyong replies, trying to keep his voice steady. He’s breathing hard himself. The brush with SM was too close for his liking. “We’re here to help you. If you want me to drop you somewhere safe, I can do that, and we won’t bother you again. But we really came to offer you a roof over your head and food in your mouth, so that you don’t have to get yourself caught checking into motels anymore. It’s up to you.”

Jungwoo’s hand is feeling across the wall until he finds the little bench seat behind him, sitting down on it with a sigh. “Hyung, please remind me never to come on a rescue mission again.”

Sungchan shoots a look at him, eyes boggling. “Why? Why did you come to rescue me? Why take the risk of bringing me with you at all?”

“You’re like us,” Taeyong says, trying to meet his eyes in the dim hut. “We have to look out for each other when the world is against us. Also, I wouldn’t wish a stay at SM labs on anyone.”

“Strength in numbers,” Jungwoo says, breathing in through his nose, out through his mouth. “There are twelve more where we came from, living safely away from the labs. Some of them have never even been there. To be so lucky, right?” He quirks a small smile, and there it is—the real reason he’d wanted Jungwoo to come along. He’s never met anyone so disarming upon first impression.

“Twelve others? All hiding from SM?”

“Do you not read the news?” Jungwoo asks, tone light. “I thought everyone in South Korea knew Taeyong’s face. Most of the rest of us get shown on T.V. every so often, too.”

“I do,” Sungchan says, glancing between them. “I recognise both of you. But that doesn’t mean you’re safe.”

“Good stranger danger instincts, but we’re not going to force you to do anything you don’t want to.”

They stay quiet as Sungchan’s breathing evens out with theirs, until the hut doesn’t feel quite so small anymore. Taeyong waits for him to break the silence again, voice small this time.

“Do you really mean it? I can stay with you?”

“I really mean it,” he promises.

“Is it safe? Your hideout?”

“We’ve been hiding successfully for some time, now. We know how to get by, and I know you’re new to this. Let us help you, and you can help us stay safe in return.”

Sungchan bites down on his lip, red and raw. “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

“Good,” he says. “Neither do we. But we still have to protect ourselves.”

Sungchan looks at Jungwoo again, slumped against the hut wall. Taeyong gets it. He’s tired, too.

“You don’t have to stay permanently if you don’t want to. But at least stay with us for a little while, see what you think. I promise we’ll look after you.”

Sungchan looks to be on the verge of tears. He fidgets on the spot, taking in a breath and releasing it again, shaky. “Okay.”

That’ll do. The kid’s been through a lot. He holds his hands out again, and Sungchan reaches out slower this time. Grips his hand gently, and Taeyong squeezes back, firm. “Thank you for trusting us.”

Sungchan only nods. Jungwoo stands again, rolling his neck and sighing. “Home?”

“Yeah,” Taeyong smiles. “Home.”

Jungwoo takes his hand, and the three of them disappear from the hut together.

-

When they snap back into the office room, Doyoung instantly whips around from the window to look at them, wide-eyed and anxious. Yuta is still sat in the same position they’d left him in, hands clasped together, elbows resting on the desk, staring straight ahead as the white noise of the police radio crackles in the corner. He lifts his head to look at them when they materialise, but Doyoung is already swooping over to greet them, taking Jungwoo into his arms.

“Oh, thank God. Let’s never make an important decision that quickly again.” He moves over to hug Taeyong too, and Taeyong returns the hold gladly, dropping a reassuring kiss to the side of his head.

“It was necessary, and it worked. We’re back in one piece, so it’s all fine.”

“Be glad you’re back in one piece, or I wouldn’t be so nice right now,” he says, stopping in front of Sungchan and thankfully restraining himself from a third hug. The kid is twitchy enough without being enveloped by a stranger. “Hi there! Welcome to the hideout. I’m Doyoung, and this is Yuta. We’re really glad you got here safely.”

Sungchan nods, mouth opening then abruptly clamping shut again.

“Everything go smoothly?” Yuta asks from his seat.

“I wouldn’t say smoothly,” Jungwoo says. “But we did it.”

“Anything we need to worry about?”

“Nah. Just the usual. Definitely got sighted by pedestrians, but what can you do? We were putting on a bit of a show.”

“Where is this place?” Sungchan asks. Taeyong follows his line of sight to the window and out to the field surrounding their building, and the empty industrial estate beyond that.

“That’s a good question.” He puts a gentle hand on his arm, guiding him over to the office door. “Come on, I’ll show you around.”

“Kun has been stress baking, if you want to go and find him for food,” Doyoung says. “He’ll want to know you’re back, too.”

“Will do. This won’t take long.” It’s better for Sungchan to know where exactly he’s been brought to, make sure he’s settled. They can’t afford him bolting again.

Sungchan is still gripping his bag to his front as he follows Taeyong out of the room. Jungwoo joins them, but splits off to head towards the stairs, waving as he goes. “I’m going to find Kun and his baking, let him know we’re back.”

“See you there,” he says, leading Sungchan the other way, along the top floor corridor. He stops at the door at the end, opening it up to the dark room beyond.

Hendery’s hub is a strange juxtaposition of tightly pulled blinds and the harsh glow of a dozen screens, lighting the room with odd shadows, but Hendery’s eyes are shining bright when he spins in his chair to look back at them. “Hello!” he greets, loud, hopping up from his chair and bounding over to them. “You guys did great! I watched the whole thing from down here. Close call, don’t you think?”

“Watched it?” Sungchan asks, staring at the screens. “How?”

“Hacked a few satellites,” he grins. “It makes things easier.”

“This is Hendery,” Taeyong says, resting a hand on Hendery’s shoulder. “Technopath, and the best in the hideout at making sure we’re safe and secure.”

“It’s nice to meet you, man,” Hendery says, sticking his hand out. “I was the one who found you, you know. I was so excited to see your name pop up, dude, I’ve been wanting to meet you for a while, so I was really hoping Taeyong could get to you. And now you’re here!”

“Thanks,” Sungchan says, taking Hendery’s hand cautiously, who shakes it with vigour.

“No problem. It’s the most exciting thing to happen around here for a while, so I should be thanking you, really. You’ve even given me a lead to work on, which is great, because SM have been shy for a while now.”

“A lead?” Taeyong asks, perking up.

“I’m tracking the truck they sent out to fetch Sungchan. I’ve never seen one as heavy-duty as that. Who knows? It might lead us right back to their new labs.”

“To SM? You’re looking for their new labs?” Sungchan asks.

“They relocated after your escape,” Taeyong explains. “Which was impressive work, by the way. But they still have some of our friends in there.”

“You want to get them out?” He looks between them, frowning. “Really?”

Taeyong surveys him. Most of the people in this building have escaped SM before. Sungchan himself did it. Why the pessimism? “We’ll talk about that later. For now, let’s just get you settled, shall we?”

“Are you doing the grand tour?” Hendery asks, and Taeyong nods, ushering Sungchan back out of the room. “Enjoy. It’ll be nice to have a new face around here.”

Taeyong waves as they go, shutting the hub door behind them. He leads the way back across the corridor to the room opposite, opening the door quietly.

“Welcome to the bedroom,” he says, keeping his voice low when he spots a few sleeping figures. He points at the first pair, a lanky boy and his grey-haired cat, curled up in the corner. “That’s Yangyang, with Ten. Ten isn’t always a cat.”

“He’s the shapeshifter,” Sungchan says, before pointing at Yangyang. “But I don’t recognise him.”

“Yangyang is one of the lucky few who’s never been inside the labs. He’s also the only person living here who doesn’t have an ability. He’s Kun’s brother, and they came into hiding with us together, a few months ago now.”

“Who’s the new guy?” Jaemin pipes up from where he’s sitting beside Jeno. Taeyong turns his way, resting an arm across Sungchan’s shoulders.

“This is Sungchan. Hendery found him very suddenly earlier, and Jungwoo and I went on a snap mission to collect him. Sungchan, this is Jaemin and Jeno.”

Jaemin waves in greeting, and Sungchan nods back. Taeyong looks at Jeno, who’s still sleeping on the only real bed in the room. “Is he doing okay?”

“Not really.” Jaemin’s voice is a shade too bitter, and Taeyong makes a mental note to come back and talk to him later.

“He’ll be okay. He came down with a fever last night, and we’re hoping he’ll sleep it off,” he explains to Sungchan, walking over to the pair. “Has Kun looked at him today?” he asks Jaemin.

Jaemin nods. “He said that it’s probably just the flu. He can help him through it, but it’s up to Jeno to fight it off.”

“Poor baby,” he murmurs, placing a gentle hand to Jeno’s forehead. He’s burning hot. “He’s getting plenty of water, right?”

“Yes. I’ve been staying with him.”

“You’re doing a good job. He’ll be alright, Jaemin.”

Jaemin looks down at his fingers, nodding slightly. Taeyong definitely needs to talk to him later.

When they leave the bedroom again, Sungchan pauses in the corridor, glancing around them. “Taeyong?”

“Yes?”

“Is this a school building?”

“It is. It’s an old sports building, to be precise. What gave it away?”

Sungchan gestures to the bedroom. “That room doesn’t look like a bedroom. It’s too big, and the windows look just like the ones in my old school.”

“You’re right. We renovated the empty classrooms on the top floor to suit our needs. There’s also the office room we arrived in, which is where we do a lot of the planning, but wait until you see the downstairs. It’s much more exciting.” He starts towards the staircase, Sungchan keeping close step beside him. “We have a bathroom with showers, a big sports hall for those who want to practise with their abilities, and even a little kitchen we can work with. It’s not very big for a sports building, but it’s plenty big enough for all of us.”

“How have you kept all this hidden for nearly a year?” Sungchan asks, disbelief evident. “How does no one know you’re here with all of this going on inside?”

He watches his feet as they step down the stairs, stopping and leaning into the bathroom on the right to show him where the toilets are. “Toilets, if you need them. Running water in the showers. As for the hideout, we have to thank Jeno and Jaemin for that. Jeno transformed parts of the building so that they’re secure for us, and Jaemin is good at making people who come along forget that the building is here at all. It’s very useful.”

Sungchan looks around at the bathroom absently. “Is it true? What they say about him on the news? Does Jaemin control minds?”

“No. It’s not like that. He’s been able to modify memories a little, but it’s a far cry from mind control. You might find everyone here is different to the rumours that go round about them.”

Sungchan nods, and Taeyong leads him down to the sports hall. “The other guys in the labs told me the true stories about all of you, and since my escape the news makes me sound scarier than I am, too. I’ve learned not to trust everything I hear. I just had to ask.”

“Good,” he says, and pauses outside the hall doors. There’s the muffled sound of an explosion from the inside, and for yet another day he’s thankful that he and Jeno worked to soundproof the whole room. “Fair warning, it sounds like they’re practising in here.”

Sungchan nods briskly, and Taeyong pushes the door open. They walk straight into a snowstorm, filling the sports hall with swirling white and deafening noise. Wind whips past their faces, and Taeyong shivers in his t-shirt, but Sungchan only gazes around at the sight.

“Xiao Dejun?” he asks loudly, pointing at the snow, and Taeyong gives him a thumbs up.

“Correct. And Lee Donghyuck,” he shouts, pointing at the faint figure he can make out in the middle of the room, palms raised to the wind. A second later, twin explosions blast from Donghyuck’s palms, clearing the air momentarily. He can feel the blast of hot air from here, before the cold wind bats by again, raising goosebumps on his chest and arms.

“Hey!” a voice rises above the noise, and he turns to see Chenle standing at the edge of the room, beaming at them. “Half-time! They’re back!”

The snowstorm lets up almost immediately, the wind stilling and allowing the snowflakes to float down to a rest on the sports hall floor. As the air starts to clear, Dejun emerges from a gust of white, his footsteps loud on the settled snow.

Chenle reaches them first though, throwing himself onto Taeyong in a strong hug. “I’m so glad you’re back okay! Is Jungwoo back too?”

“Jungwoo is fine. He went to let Kun know we’re back, so I’d better catch up with them before Kun has my neck for making him wait.”

Chenle laughs, high and loud. “Oh, he will, he was worrying so much! I told him it was going to be okay. You’re always okay, Hyung.”

“I do my best,” he says, patting Donghyuck’s shoulder as he reaches them, too. “Sungchan, this is Chenle. Chenle, Donghyuck, Dejun, this is Sungchan. He’s going to be staying with us for a while.”

“Yes,” Sungchan says, staring at Chenle. “Um.”

“Hey there, new guy,” Donghyuck says, despite the fact that Taeyong had just introduced him by name. “Aren’t you the one with the earthquakes?”

Sungchan shrugs slightly, shying away from the looks of the other three. “I can shake stuff, I guess.”

“Like Taylor swift?” Donghyuck asks, and Chenle immediately starts singing _shake it off, shake it off_.

“Like—” Sungchan eyes the room around them, then raises his hand, aiming at a knee-high pile of snow a few feet away. Taeyong feels the tell-tale rumble of Sungchan’s power rattling the air, then watches as it blasts the snow apart, scattering clumps around the room. Some of it blasts back on them, and Chenle laughs again, delighted.

“Woah,” Dejun says, appreciative. “Nice! You’ll be fun to spar with!”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Taeyong says, placing a hand on Sungchan’s shoulder to lead him from the room again. “Sungchan just got here, and he doesn’t have to spar any of you unless he wants to.”

“Sir, yes, sir!” Donghyuck says, striking a strong salute.

“Don’t do that,” he reprimands. “You can get back to it. We’re going to eat some of whatever’s currently baking down the hall.”

“It’s cookies. Kun told me off for trying to eat the batter,” Chenle informs him.

“Brilliant,” he says, pulling the door open again. “Enjoy yourselves.”

“We will!” Donghyuck calls.

“Okay, I’m joining in this round,” Chenle announces, turning back to the sports hall.

He hears Donghyuck and Dejun groaning. “You’ll win too easily if you join in!” Donghyuck complains.

“Then let’s do two on one!” he hears Chenle suggest brightly before the door shuts behind them.

Sungchan stares at the door, and Taeyong cracks a grin. “Like I said. Not what you expected?”

He shakes his head. “No. You’ve seen the wanted broadcast they put out about you guys, right? They make Chenle out to be some sort of ruthless killer. But he’s actually a little cherub or something.”

He can’t help but laugh. “Chenle is a good kid. SM have a tendency to reduce us to the worst parts of our powers.”

“Yeah,” Sungchan says, looking down at his feet. “They sure do.”

He knows Hendery and Yuta must be itching to debrief this kid—and he can’t say he’s not curious himself—but that can wait for now. As far as they know, it’s been a while since Sungchan has been with family or friends, or anyone at all who would give him the time of day. He could stand to have a hot meal and some good company first. “Come on. You must be hungry. Let’s get some cookies.”

Kun stops chopping his vegetables as soon as Taeyong enters the kitchen, turning his knife to point in his direction. “Lee Taeyong! I can’t believe you started the tour before coming to tell me you were back safe! Was I the last stop on the list?”

Taeyong puts his hands in the air, submitting immediately. Jungwoo is sitting on the table behind Kun, legs swinging as he chews on a fresh cookie, while Mark stands from the chair beside him to give Taeyong a hug.

“If Jungwoo told you that, wouldn’t you already know that we were back safely?” He reasons, lowering his hands and stepping aside to give Sungchan space. He embraces Mark’s hug, patting him on the back. “I was trying to show our friend his new home.”

“Sorry,” Sungchan says meekly, and Kun immediately puts down his knife, coming over to put his hands on Sungchan’s arms.

“Oh, no, it’s okay, it’s not your fault,” he says, voice softening out completely. “If you’re hungry, there are cookies for you. Get one before Jungwoo eats them all.”

“It all went fine,” Taeyong says, gently, stepping forwards to kiss Kun quickly. “No need to worry.”

“Good. But I still don’t have to like it whenever you leave.” Kun leans in to give him a kiss back before moving back over to the countertop.

“I did tell him you’d come back alright,” Mark offers, scratching the back of his head.

Taeyong gestures to Mark. “See? When has he been wrong about these things? You can’t even trust Mark’s foresight?”

“It’s nice to hear, but this little thing called human emotion keeps me on my toes. More importantly, I’m starting dinner, if you could round up a few people to help me…?”

“I can help, and the kids might be in once they’ve finished sparring. Do you want me to wake up Yangyang?”

“He’s sleeping? What for?”

“Joining Ten’s afternoon nap, I think. They’re two peas in a pod, these days.”

“Oh, I’m fine, thank you,” Sungchan is saying weakly, as Jungwoo holds out the plate of cookies in his direction. They’re piled high, because Kun is used to cooking for fourteen hungry boys.

“You can eat if you’re hungry,” Taeyong tells him gently, because he can see the way he’s looking at the cookies despite his refusal. “What’s ours is yours, and so on. We share everything here.”

“Just have one, at least,” Kun urges. “That way you can eat properly at dinner, too.”

Sungchan looks at the plate, hesitating. Jungwoo shuffles up on the table, patting the spot beside him, beckoning Sungchan to come and sit with him.

“Hey, what’s this?” Kun says, coming back up to him again, and Taeyong watches as he reaches out to touch his hairline. His fingers come away with a little blood on them, and Taeyong stares, surprised. “Did you get hurt?”

Before he knows it, Taeyong is being ushered into one of the chairs so that Kun can run his fingers over his scalp. “Oh,” he realises, as Sungchan goes stiff beside him. “It’s probably from the glass. I’m fine, seriously. I didn’t even feel it.”

Kun picks out a small piece of glass from his hair, and then another, and another. “What happened?” he asks, running his fingers over the small gashes. Warmth trails behind his touch, injuries sealing up under Kun's careful fingers.

“Had a run in with a window. Don’t worry about it,” he says, and Jungwoo snorts. “Just my excitement of the day.”

“That’s pretty cool, Hyung,” Mark says, wide-eyed.

Kun shoots Taeyong an unimpressed look, like he’s worried the kids will start running into windows for fun, now. Truthfully, he wouldn’t put it past Donghyuck and Chenle. “You haven’t done any real damage, but you should be more careful. Take a shower before dinner.”

“Will do,” he says, standing and carefully scooping the glass from the table. “I’ll take these to the scrap box.”

“Fine,” Kun says, heading over to the sink to wash his hands. “Can you send Doyoung to help me, and wake up Yangyang and Ten on your way? They could be more useful and help me with these peppers.”

“Will do.” He looks up at Sungchan, who has finally relented to Jungwoo, nibbling cautiously on a cookie. “Will you be alright if I go and shower?”

He nods quickly, then says in a low voice, “I’m sorry about pushing you out of the window.”

Taeyong just pats his arm. “Don’t worry about it. Welcome to life in the underground, kid. I think you’re going to fit in well here. Any questions, any worries, you can come to me, okay?”

“Reliable leader,” Jungwoo croons, seemingly in a much better mood now than he was fifteen minutes ago. “Oh, wise one.”

“Anyone here will happily help you out, actually” he says, looking at Jungwoo pointedly. “They’re all good people.”

“But especially our leader Yongie,” Jungwoo says, and Taeyong shakes his head at him, smiling.

“I hope you’ll find yourself at home here, Sungchan.”

As he leaves the kitchen, he can hear Mark begin to ask about Sungchan’s ability, and smiles to himself. He can feel Sungchan’s eyes on his back as he shuts the door, but he knows he’s in good company.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in future i'll write anything that i think needs a trigger warning in the end notes, but this chapter probably shows the tone for the whole thing. some action, some tension, some lighter team family scenes, some stress and worry amongst the members. each chapter will be from a different perspective, so each one is slightly different in that sense too. there are already a few warnings in the tags, but let me know if you think anything else needs to be tagged :)


	2. Jaemin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a quick recap of the abilities revealed last chapter in case you need it:  
> Taeyong: Teleportation  
> Jungwoo: Super speed  
> Sungchan: Vibrations/quakes  
> Hendery: Technopath  
> Ten: Cat shapeshifting  
> Yangyang: No power  
> Jeno: Material manipulation  
> Jaemin: Memory manipulation/exploration  
> Dejun: Weather creation/manipulation  
> Donghyuck: Explosions  
> Chenle: Superhuman combat abilities  
> Mark: Foresight  
> Kun: Healing

Kun practically orders him to leave the bedroom and get himself some dinner, and not to bring it back up here, Jaemin, but actually show your face downstairs for a while. He would argue, but Kun doesn’t take no for an answer when it comes to matters of self-care, and he doesn’t really want to put any extra burden on his shoulders. Kun is already the one doing the most for Jeno out of everyone, promising to keep an eye on him while Jaemin takes a half an hour break from Jeno duty. It’s not the worst idea. He’d resorted to letting the room grow dark around him, not wanting to move too much and disturb Jeno’s sleep, and it had made him grouchy and reluctant and too far from his usual self.

That’s all Jeno has done for nearly twenty-four hours, though. Sleep. He doesn’t know why no one else is more worried about it—when had Donghyuck had been sick over the winter, it had been a whole operation to get him some medication and a real bed to sleep in, to make sure he would recover properly. He doesn’t resent them for that, because it had been scary—Donghyuck had been really sick, and his life was in their hands. But isn’t Jeno worth just as much time and care and fussing as Donghyuck?

“Jaemin,” Doyoung greets as he enters the sports hall, where everyone apart from Kun and Jeno have already gathered on the floor around their food tables. It’s rare for so many members of the group to eat at the same time like this—even Hendery has been pulled out of the hub to join them, with Jaemin the last one to the party. “Hi. How’s Jeno doing?”

“Not much better,” he says, sitting between him and Chenle as Taeyong dishes him out some kimchi jjigae. “Kun is helping him burn off the fever, so he’ll get through it quicker, but he’s still not through the worst of it, I think.”

“He’s tough,” Chenle says through a mouthful of food. “He’ll be okay.”

“I know,” he says, because he does. “But he’s still struggling a lot.”

“We should hold onto the last few things he transformed, for now,” Yuta says from a few seats up. “We don’t know when he’ll be up and healthy again, so it’s better to save them in case we urgently need to trade for something.”

He can feel the wide eyes of the new kid, Sungchan, watching them from across the table. “What does Jeno do?”

“Jeno’s power is amazing,” Mark enthuses from Sungchan’s side. “He almost single-handedly runs our hideout economy. Taeyong takes teams out to collect scrap metal, or old clothes, stuff like that, and we bring it back to Jeno. And Jeno can transform anything into something else, as long as the materials are similar- he’s transformed most of the clothes we’re wearing now, just how we want them! Usually he twists metal into jewellery, so we can sell it for money and buy what we need. It’s the best to watch him turn sheets of glass into statues. He was training in carpentry before…” Mark trails off, gesturing around the room. “You know. His ability came about, and SM found him. So he’s really good at that kind of thing.”

Jaemin looks down at his bowl, taking another spoonful of hot stew. Jeno and Chenle are the only people here that he’d known before all this—before he could see into minds, before the SM labs, before their escape. He remembers clearly how hard Jeno had been working in his carpentry apprenticeship, and he remembers the designs he used to keep to himself, shy artworks stuffed into notebooks. He doesn’t create things for fun anymore. His ability is too important to the hideout, and it tires him out too much.

“How did you all end up here in the first place?” Sungchan asks. “How could you even begin to imagine a hideout like this?”

“How far back do you want to go? The building? The fourteen of us?” Donghyuck says. “It’s a long story. Why don’t you start with what you know about us, instead?”

Sungchan looks around the table, the quieter conversations tapering off as everyone diverts their attention to him. Jaemin knows they’re all curious. Sungchan’s escape is something they’ve talked about a lot amongst themselves, because Taeyong was the one who’d orchestrated the first escape from SM, as well as the follow up rescue mission. They hadn’t imagined anyone could pull off a third escape after that—and certainly not on their own, as Sungchan seems to have done.

He nods, swallowing, putting his spoon back down on the table. “I know some things. I know that most of you were in the labs, to start with. I know that Taeyong was the first one they tracked down, along with Taeil, and some of you went to SM willingly once your powers came about. At first, they just wanted to know what you could do, and how you could do it. After a while, things changed, and Taeyong escaped with Doyoung, Jungwoo, Jeno and Chenle.”

“You’ve done your research,” Doyoung says. “One minute I’m in my labs bedroom, and the next minute Taeyong is there, grabbing me in one hand and Jeno in the other. Before I can ask if he’s crazy, we turn up here, in this dusty old building.”

“My cousin used to go to school here,” Taeyong explains. “I remember coming here with my parents to pick him up, once. I can only teleport to places I’ve been to before, or places I can see directly, but we needed to go somewhere they wouldn’t think to look for us. It was my first thought for an obscure hiding place.”

“When we found out it was deserted, we stayed overnight, and then we realised no one was coming at all. SM hadn’t found us, and the building had been abandoned since the year before. We had no water, no heat and no light at first, but it was safe, and that was what we needed.”

“Why didn’t you all get out in the first escape?” Sungchan asks. “Why did you only go back for them after months?”

Taeyong shifts in his seat so that his legs are stretched out in front of him, and casually starts to roll up a trouser leg. Jaemin doesn’t look. He already knows what’s there—the mangled remains of Taeyong’s calf, half of it missing, fused with metal and plastic to keep him whole. Most of it had been Jeno’s panicked work, old desk legs and an abandoned briefcase twisted into an approximation of a limb after Taeyong had appeared with Chenle and Jungwoo, screaming, blood everywhere, half of his calf missing. He’d seen it in Jeno’s memory, once they were reunited. It’s a moment neither of them wants to relive.

Sungchan swears under his breath, staring at the remains of Taeyong’s leg. “They did that to you?”

“They don’t know how to suppress my ability,” Taeyong affirms quietly. “The only way they know how to stop me is heavy duty fire. The plan was to get everyone out that night, but I can only teleport two people at a time, and they know that. They waited for me to come back for Jungwoo and Chenle. It’s a miracle the two of them weren’t hurt in the crossfire.”

“It’s a miracle you brought them back at all,” Doyoung says. “You did your best. But in the end, we had to leave everyone else back at the labs.”

“So then came the rescue mission, once I was healed enough,” Taeyong says. “We knew they were expecting us to come in teleporting, so we did the opposite. A stealth mission, with Doyoung’s illusions disguising the two of us as staff. We managed to get more people out, that time. Hands up, those rescued?”

Jaemin diligently raises his hand, along with Ten, Mark, Dejun and Donghyuck. “SM was still prepared for them to come, though,” Jaemin explains. “They couldn’t let all of us get away that easily. A guard found us and began to call for others, but Renjun saved us.”

“He did,” Taeyong agrees. “But it was too risky to go back, after that. Renjun and three of our other friends were left there—Taeil, Johnny and Lucas. You might know them. We made plans to go back for them again, but by the time we did, they were gone. SM had relocated. We still don’t know where to.” He pulls his leg back under him, facing his empty bowl bitterly. “They’ve been with SM for months since then, and we don’t know where. Hendery came along a little while after that—he found us, actually, wanted to hide here and help us stay safe.” Hendery throws up a smile and a peace sign from the other side of the table. “He helped us find Yuta and Kun, and we took them in before SM could get to them, too. Then he helped us find you.”

“And I’m just here for the ride,” Yangyang says, grinning. “Like the group mascot, or something.”

“You’re a shitty mascot,” Donghyuck tells him. “You don’t even dance for us.”

“I can if you want me to,” Yangyang says, raising both eyebrows. “Just say the words.”

“Sungchan,” Jaemin interrupts, unable to keep the question contained any longer. “Do you know if they’re still okay? Everyone we left behind?”

“Your friends are okay,” Sungchan says, drawing everyone’s attention again. There’s complete silence in the sports hall for a few seconds, and Jaemin holds his breath. “As okay as you can be under SM, at least. My brother and I were brought in only a few days after your rescue mission. I knew all four of them, and they told me about you guys. They didn’t hold any bad feelings towards you, and they knew it would be impossible for you to break into SM for a third time.”

Jungwoo buries his face in his hands, and Jaemin feels like his heart has stopped in his chest. Sungchan was at SM, for a long while—he knows Renjun, and the others, too. He’s lived with him, been with him all this time Jaemin couldn’t be. He’s itching to reach into Sungchan’s mind, see what his last memories of Renjun are, see if he’s okay. But he knows it’ll only distract them both. Everyone is here to hear his story, not have Jaemin drag it out of him.

“You escaped two months ago, right?” Hendery asks. “Surely you must know where they relocated to after the rescue?”

Sungchan nods again, but it’s dispirited. “I don’t really know where I was when I escaped. I just kept running and running. It’s a miracle I got away. I might be able to trace my steps back and take you there, but it would be useless. They were relocating us every few weeks to keep us hidden.”

Doyoung slumps back onto his hands at that. “Of course. They can’t let anyone else get away.”

“They’re bound to be doing everything they can to keep them under control since I left, too. It’s going to be harder than ever to get to them.”

“How did you get out?” Ten asks, sharp eyes curious. “It took teams of us with a teleporter to do it before. How could you possibly escape on your own?”

Sungchan looks down at his hands, blinking rapidly. “I wasn’t on my own, at first. The plan was to get all of us out. Your four friends, me and my brother, and a new guy they’d picked up after us, Sicheng. We’d made a plan to jump from the truck the next time they relocated us, and run as fast as we could to get away.” His voice starts to shake, and he draws his knees up closer to his chest. “It’s like you said. They don’t know how to supress our abilities. So whenever we were moved, they’d sedate us for the trip. But because Jaehyun and I were new, they didn’t know what we needed. They give Johnny a bigger dosage, because his ability makes him burn through drugs quickly, right? But Jaehyun—his ability can flush it out completely. They didn’t know that then, so he was secretly conscious for the whole trip.”

“What can he do?” Yuta asks.

“He can change his density. Become as heavy as stone, or pass straight through walls. After they gave us the dose, he became intangible before the drugs could pass through his system, and the sedative dropped right out of him.”

“Wow,” Hendery says, leaning in closer. “That’s amazing.”

“He can do it to other people too. He made me intangible, once we were on the way, and I woke up so confused in the back of this moving truck, but it had worked. Our plan was ready to go. But the longer the drugs were in our system, the harder it was for Jaehyun to help us flush it out—and especially for Johnny, when his dose was so strong, and his body processes it so quickly—”

He breaks off, shaking, and Jungwoo takes his hand, reassuring. “You did your best. It’s okay.”

Sungchan shakes his head, wiping his eyes roughly with the back of his hands. “You asked me how I escaped, but I didn’t do anything, really. It was a disaster. We were relying on Johnny to break us out of the truck, but we couldn’t wake him up properly, and—and—”

Jaemin hadn’t gone delving into Sungchan’s mind, but he’s reliving the memory for himself as he tells it, and that’s enough for it to be projected loud and clear for Jaemin. He can sense Sungchan’s panic as Jaehyun does his best to wake up Taeil, can sense his feeling of being disoriented and nauseous in the back of this huge moving truck. Sungchan is trying to shake Johnny awake, but he’s dead asleep, unresponsive. Two of their best fighters are out for the count, and the plan is going wrong, already.

“Jaehyun,” Lucas says, from where he’s squatting next to Renjun, shaking him. Despite the sedatives, they’d also given Renjun his muzzle, and they’d all woken up in handcuffs—Johnny’s being more like huge metal clamps. “I think we have to go.”

Jaehyun leans over to take Lucas’s hands in his, and the handcuffs drop from his wrists, phased right through onto the truck floor. Then he kneels beside Renjun, pulls him into sitting up—the muzzle drops free, as do the handcuffs, but Renjun is still out of it, head lolling against his chest and eyelids fluttering as he tries to register his surroundings. Jaemin wasn’t here, isn’t a part of this memory, but his chest physically aches, seeing him again. He wishes he could reach out to him.

“It’s been too long,” Sicheng says, needlessly. Sungchan wouldn’t say it, but he can feel it, too—there’s enough sedative in him to still feel dizzy, and he knows he was the first one Jaehyun had woken up. “We aren’t getting out of here.”

“I’m sorry,” Jaehyun says, desperate. “They had guards in here—I had to take them out before waking you up, and they took longer getting Johnny in here than we thought. It all took too long.”

“I can still get us out,” Sungchan says, voice shaking. “I can get the truck open, then—we can just run for it—”

“And leave them here?” Sicheng asks, voice grating with trapped tears of frustration, but Sungchan knows he’s just afraid. He can feel it in the air, waves of fear and anxiety rolling over all of them, his empathic ability stifling them in the dark truck. “They’re not going anywhere right now.”

“What else are we supposed to do?” Jaehyun snaps. “Control your ability, Sicheng, this isn’t helping.”

“They’d want us to get out if we could,” Lucas says, swallowing. “You know they would.”

“Go,” Taeil’s slurred voice suddenly says from where he’s lying beside Johnny. “Go.”

Jaehyun makes a noise of helpless frustration, crouching next to him and grasping his hand. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, Hyung.”

“We’ll come back for you,” Lucas promises, absolute certainty in his voice. “I promise.” He slings an arm around Renjun’s shoulders, pulling him close to press a quick kiss to his forehead. “All of you.”

Renjun is asleep again. Jaemin wants to run his hands through his too-long hair, hold him close, tell him they’ll come back for him, too.

Sungchan stands, beckoning to Sicheng. Sicheng only shakes his head, grim, furiously scrubbing the tears in his eyes. “I can’t. My legs feel like lead. You go without me.”

Jaemin can feel Sungchan gripping his own hair, too overwhelmed. Everything had gone wrong. Jaehyun ducks down in front of Sicheng, pulling him into a hug. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Just go,” he whispers, gesturing urgently. “Get out. Get far away.”

“We’ll be back,” Lucas says again, and Sungchan raises a hand, ready to blast the back of the truck out.”

Jaehyun grabs his wrist. “Wait. Not like that. If it’s just two of you, I can get you out subtly. Be ready to jump.” He grabs Lucas by the hand, too, and pulls them both over to the wall of the truck.

“Oh, wow. Seriously?” Lucas asks.

“Brace yourselves,” Jaehyun says. Then he grips them tight, and jumps right through the truck wall.

Lucas will be fine. Having unbreakable skin and bones lends well to jumping from fast moving vehicles, he imagines, and Sungchan can manage falls well, too. With one hand in front of him, he dulls the impact of the landing with a well-aimed quake, the force of the vibrations keeping him balanced. He just about manages to land on two feet, the acceleration propelling him to run several steps down the road before he can turn back for the other two. Lucas is rolling out further down the road, and Jaehyun has landed between them, laid out on his back.

Jaehyun can make himself as heavy as lead to avoid major breaks, but it doesn’t make him invincible. His skin is torn all up one arm and leg, the side of his face marred red by sliced flesh. He pushes himself up on two hands as Sungchan runs towards him, and spits a tooth from his mouth. Further down the street, they can hear the sounds of the truck coming to a stop, of shouting. There had been an SM car trailing the truck, and the guards had seen them leap out, clear as day.

“Hyung, we have to go,” he says, pulling at Jaehyun’s arm, who’s wincing, limping on one leg.

He tries to drag him into running, but he’s limping too badly, face contorted in pain. Lucas catches up with them in seconds, and he knows that SM will be there in no time, too.

“Fuck—Sungchan, go,” Jaehyun says, ripping his arm from his grip.

“No,” he says, tears blurring his vision, but he already knows he has no choice. Jaehyun won’t get far like this. Lucas grabs his arm, giving Jaehyun a look as he pulls Sungchan away.

“I love you!” Jaehyun shouts, fast, like they might be the last words he says to Sungchan, and despair sits deep in his stomach.

“No!” he screams. A great rumble erupts from within him, vibrating the earth, cracking the concrete around them. The approaching SM agents are blown from their feet, and Jaehyun staggers too, but Lucas keeps running, dragging him along, and Sungchan goes willingly. He doesn’t want to leave Jaehyun, but he doesn’t want to disappoint him, either.

They make it several streets away before SM catch up with them, and Sungchan willingly takes care of the approaching car, flipping it over with one angry twist of a hand. Lucas gasps, clapping him on the back before leading the way through someone’s backyard to get to the main road.

“Lucas actually made it with me, for a little while,” Sungchan is saying, and Jaemin is brought back into reality to the sound of his sniffles in the echoing sports hall. “We ran all day and then—it was so stupid—we got cornered by police who’d recognised us in a convenience store. They tasered Lucas, but… I ran. And left him there.” The guilt in his voice is heavy, and tears run down his cheeks as Jungwoo holds him. “I could’ve dragged him with me, or done something, but I just—I was so exhausted and afraid—”

Taeyong is shaking his head. “You wouldn’t have made it far if you’d tried that. You did the best you could.”

“In the end, I was the only one who escaped,” he whispers. Jaemin sees quick flashes of memories—empty alleyways, abandoned buildings, sleeping on rooftops and in warehouses and behind dumpsters. Anywhere to avoid people, to avoid being seen, for the last two months. “While they’re all still in stuck there.”

“Hyung?” Chenle says into Jaemin’s ear, and Jaemin starts, turning to face him. Chenle is looking up at him, mouth slightly open, eyes concerned.

“What?” he says, and his voice is rough, and then Doyoung’s hands are suddenly there, wiping his cheeks. He’d been crying, too. “Oh. Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Doyoung says, almost a coo. “You alright?”

He nods, trying to take a steady breath in. He can feel everyone’s eyes on him.

“Jaemin can’t help but see things sometimes, if the memory is strong,” Mark explains to Sungchan in a low voice.

“Oh,” Sungchan says. Vaguely, he can sense Sungchan pulling up another memory—one deliberately meant for him this time. He can see Renjun is there, so it’s too easy give in, slipping into Sungchan’s past again.

It’s brief. He’s in the dining hall with everyone—thirty minutes to eat for every meal, the only amount of social interaction they could all rely on each day—and Renjun is sitting opposite him. Johnny asks,

“If you could have a meal with any three people, living or dead, who would it be?” because he was always asking them stupid things like that to distract from their reality, to keep up their spirits.

Sungchan’s memory obscures for a moment. Taeil’s answer is indistinct, some celebrity he doesn’t know, as is Lucas’s. Sicheng doesn’t give an answer. Jaehyun’s answer is his family, and Sungchan remembers that one, remembers agreeing. Then Renjun says,

“Jaemin and Jeno.” A hush falls on the room, because the guards don’t like it when they talk about the escapees, but Renjun doesn’t care. He’s got his blindfold on, hands cuffed in front of him like they make him do whenever he can’t wear the muzzle, and he must be so, so tired of it. “And Gordon Ramsey, so he can make us some good food.”

Jaemin is in tears again, properly this time, face in his hands as Chenle rubs his back gently. He’s so tired of it all, too.

“They all talked about you guys whenever we were able to talk about things like that,” Sungchan is saying. “I think it gave them strength, knowing you were able to hide from SM for so long.”

“That’s a comfort for us all to hear, Sungchan,” Taeyong says, soft, and Jaemin has to keep a sob down to hear him. “Thank you for telling us your story.”

“If you get a lead on SM’s new base,” Sungchan says, mustering some strength back into his voice. “I want in on your plans. I want to help get everyone out. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t at least try.”

“Understood. We discuss big plans like that as a group anyway, so you’ll know all that we know.”

Doyoung is patting his back, urging Jaemin to stand up. “Come on. Let’s make some broth to take up for Jeno, shall we?”

He didn’t realise how much he needed to leave the busy hall until he’s gone, following Doyoung down the hallway. He pushes into the kitchen, quiet but for the hum of the fridge, and breathes out slowly.

Doyoung sits him down by the table as he catches his breath, wiping his face and watching Doyoung get out a pan, heat the water, bring out some simple ingredients. He’s suddenly itching to sit by Jeno again. He hopes he’ll wake up soon, so that he can tell him what he saw about Renjun.

“Was he telling the truth?” Doyoung asks, after a few minutes of comfortable silence.

Jaemin looks up at him. Was that a concern? “Yes. The memory I saw lined up with what he was saying. Are you worried he’ll try and keep things from us?”

Doyoung turns to face him as the broth simmers. “Taeyong said he was reluctant to come with them, at first. They had a close brush with SM because of it.”

“So?”

“So doesn’t it seem like he changed his mind too quickly? He already knows who most of us are, through the news and through our friends. Why didn’t he trust Taeyong in the first place, and what changed his mind that he would tell us that story so quickly?”

“Coming here makes it clear we’re not with SM,” he says, gesturing to the building around them. “Why else would we be living in this dump, hiding away from the world? He was living on his own, sleeping in bus shelters for a long time. It makes sense to me that he would be wary of a stranger trying to take him back to his questionable hovel for super freak kids.”

“Still,” Doyoung murmurs, stirring the broth methodically a few times before turning the heat off. “It’s strange. I feel like there’s more he has to tell.”

“He only just got here, and he doesn’t know any of us. He was in SM for months, so there’s almost certainly more he can tell us. We just need to give him time.”

Doyoung nods. “You’re probably right. He seems like a good kid at heart. And Mark has taken well to him, so that’s a good sign.”

“It is,” he agrees, standing to fetch a bowl from the cupboard. He’s calmer now, but his chest still feels heavy with the new memories of Renjun, the new sense of loss that comes with seeing him just out of reach. He misses him so much.

Doyoung pours the broth out into a bowl, picks up a spoon, and walks with him back up the stairs. Kun is laying by Jeno’s side in the dark bedroom, and Doyoung switches on the corner lamp as they enter, casting a warm glow across the wide space.

To his surprise, Jeno is the one who shifts, turning his head to look at them. His eyes are bleary, his face still pale, but he’s awake.

“Hey,” Jaemin says, sitting beside him and stroking his hair from his forehead. “How long have you been awake?”

“I don’t know,” he mumbles, sighing. “I’ve just been cuddling with Kun.”

“I’m jealous,” he smiles, gentle. “Are you feeling any better?”

Jeno shrugs, and Jaemin tries not to feel disheartened. “Just the same.”

“We’re worried about you, kid,” Doyoung says, fond. “We missed you at dinner.”

“I’m sorry I missed dinner,” he rasps, coughing a few times as he tries to sit up straighter. Jaemin takes him by the arm, trying to steady him and he sits up against the headboard. “Anything new?”

“Yes, actually,” he says, carefully spooning up some of the broth and feeding it to him. Jeno leans forwards to take it without complaint. “They found Sungchan.”

Jeno nearly chokes on his mouthful. “Really? Did Hendery find him?”

“Yep. Taeyong and Jungwoo left earlier today to fetch him, brought him back in this afternoon. He’s a little jumpy, but he’s here.”

“Woah,” he says, and Jaemin takes the opportunity of his open mouth to feed him another spoonful. Jeno swallows it down quickly. “What happened to making big decisions together, though?”

“It was an emergency this time, bub. We had to move fast, and Taeyong made the call,” Doyoung explains.

“I heard Hendery yelling and running down the corridor, but even I didn’t know they’d gone until they came back.” He’d been more concerned about Hendery’s volume levels at the time, with a feverish Jeno in his lap.

“Makes sense,” Jeno says, taking another mouthful with a pout. “Is he okay?”

“Sungchan? He’s alright. He’ll settle in. He’s been on his own for a while, it seems, so it’ll be good for him to have people again.”

Jaemin puts his spoon down then, and Jeno looks at him.

“He showed me some things,” he says. “He knew the others. They were doing okay. Renjun was still talking about us, right up until Sungchan left.” His eyes are burning again. “He misses us.”

“Oh,” Jeno says, and Jaemin buries his face into his shoulder, broth clutched between shaking hands.

He feels Doyoung’s weight join him on the bed, and his hand rubbing up and down his back, soothing. “All of them tried to escape with Sungchan. They’re still fighting.”

Jeno nods, and the movement ruffles Jaemin’s hair. “Of course. They’re strong.”

“Literally, in Johnny’s case,” Doyoung says, and Jeno is polite enough to laugh.

He raises his head again when there’s movement on Jeno’s other side. “What?” Kun says, blearily. “Did I fall asleep?”

“Yeah,” Jeno smiles.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he says, looking around and blinking. “I didn’t mean to. It’s good to see you awake, Jeno.”

“It looks like you need to take care of yourself as much as you tell other people to,” Doyoung says pointedly, and Kun raises his eyebrows at him.

“Are you really going to start this one, Doyoung?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Doyoung replies, hands over his heart, and Jaemin smiles as he rests his forehead against Jeno’s. “I just think you should set a good example for the kids.”

“He’s setting the great example of sleeping, which is something I would love to do soon,” Jaemin says. Doyoung huffs a soft laugh, and they talk for a little while longer as Jeno finishes his broth. It’s quiet up here, away from the noise of the sports hall. It settles him.

That is, it’s quiet until Donghyuck comes bounding in, Chenle, Yangyang and Mark following right after him. Donghyuck has the Yut Nori board clutched to his chest, and Yangyang and Chenle are carrying several packets of snacks between them despite the no food in the bedroom rule. He can’t remember the last time one of the older guys actually tried to enforce that.

“Don’t be too loud,” Doyoung says, ruffling Chenle’s hair on the way out. “Jeno is still resting.”

“We know,” Donghyuck says, taking Kun’s vacated spot on the bed before anyone else can. “We just thought he should have a reason not to die of boredom before he gets better.”

“Be good,” Kun warns, before they shut the bedroom door behind them, and Jaemin is left with the rabble he calls friends.

“Jeno is sick, you can’t play games in here,” he tells them, though he knows it’s fruitless. Donghyuck never listens to him if he can help it, and this was clearly his idea.

“It’s okay, I want to play,” Jeno says, sitting up more. “I don’t feel tired right now, anyway.”

“That’s because you’ve been sleeping all day, dude,” Mark says, coming to sit cross-legged by Jeno’s feet. “You missed everything.”

“I know, right?” Jeno pouts, shuffling up to make space for Chenle, who curls up into his side, and Yangyang, who’s wrestling to get some space beside Donghyuck. “They just caught me up on everything. How’s Sungchan?”

“He’s really nice,” Mark answers. “I think he’s going to bring change, though.”

Mark is in the habit of saying these things completely casually, as if he isn’t absolutely right all of the time. Mark’s instincts are second to none when it comes to important events in his own future—truthfully, Jeno may single-handedly work their economy in the hideout, but Mark is a significant contribution to their finances. They’ve made good money putting bets down based on his predictions—mostly Golden State Warrior wins, because he cares about basketball the most—though Taeyong is conscious they don’t to it often to avoid making a habit out of it.

“Change?” Yangyang asks. “Good change?”

Mark scratches behind his ear as he watches Donghyuck set the Yut Nori board up in the middle of the bed. “Can’t tell yet. But it’s big change.” He shrugs, and gestures for Chenle to throw him the spicy Doritos.

Jeno looks slightly uneasy at his words—or maybe it’s the broth still settling in his stomach—but they spark a fire in Jaemin’s gut. Change? He desperately needs Renjun and his friends out of that place, to be here, with them. Sometimes the guilt of his easy life here weighs on him so heavily he doesn’t sleep for nights on end. Why do they get to be here, living away from controlling hands, while their friends are trapped in the labs every day? They’re strong enough now to fight for them. Jaemin wants to fight for them. If that’s the change Mark can sense coming, he’ll embrace it.

“What about this?” Donghyuck says, gesturing to the board. “Who do I team up with to win?”

Mark shrugs again. “I dunno. You want to team up with me?”

Donghyuck wrinkles his nose at him. “You giving me false hope, Canada?”

“If you don’t want him, I’ll have him,” Yangyang perks up from the side.

“Does no one want to be on my team?” Chenle asks. “Really?”

“I will be, Chenle,” Jeno says, eyes turning up into his sweet smile.

“No offence, but you’re dying. I want to win.”

Donghyuck sighs, loud and put-upon. “Let’s just go with age. 00’s versus the rest.”

“That splits us four versus two,” Chenle argues. “How is that fair?”

“Yes, but you two have the advantage of tactical abilities, so it’s even, right?”

“I don’t think this game of Yut Nori is significant enough for me to know—”

“You know that’s not how it works! I’m a fighter, not a board game tactician!”

Yangyang laughs from the side, unperturbed. “Let’s just do it as we’re sat. Left side versus right side?”

Mark looks up at Jeno and Jaemin and nods amicably. “Fine by me.”

“Fine,” Donghyuck says, looking to the ceiling and breathing in through his nose. “Chenle, you better have been lying about not being tactically good at board games.”

“Why would I lie about that?”

“Hi guys,” Taeyong’s voice says, and Jaemin turns to see him watching them from the doorway. “What are you playing?”

“Yut Nori,” Donghyuck says, picking up the sticks and throwing them onto the board. “Sorry, you’re too late to join.”

“That’s alright, I’ll just watch,” Taeyong says, ever agreeable as he sidles over to the bed. “How are you doing, Jeno?”

“Okay,” Jeno says, smiling up at him as Taeyong puts a gentle hand to his forehead. “I’ll be fine.”

“You will,” Taeyong agrees. “Having Kun join us was a blessing. Bet you wish he’d been here in the winter, Hyuck.”

Mark picks up the Yut Nori pieces to take their turn, and Donghyuck pulls a face. “You’re not wrong. I think some of you were more worried I’d accidentally blow a hole in the ceiling while sneezing, though.”

“That was a concern,” Taeyong admits. “At one point we considered having Yuta keep you contained, just in case.”

“I have more control than that,” Donghyuck scoffs, clutching his heart. “You wound me, Hyung.”

“You didn’t then,” Chenle points out. “It was only a few weeks after you accidentally set all our laundry on fire.”

Yangyang cackles with glee, and Donghyuck makes a swiping motion across his neck at the both of them. Taeyong gently touches Jaemin’s shoulder.

“Can I have a minute?” he asks quietly, and Jaemin nods. Jeno squeezes his hand before he leaves, and promises to win for them.

Taeyong walks him to the window at the end of the hallway, looking across the dark sports field. “How are you doing, Jaemin?” he asks, voice soft, leaning against the window frame.

Jaemin crosses his arms, looking outside instead of at Taeyong’s face. “Okay. Just worried about Jeno. Sorry I snapped at you a bit earlier.”

“Why are you worried about him?”

“He just got so sick so fast, and no one seemed that worried about it,” he admits, cheeks heating up. It feels childish to say it out loud. “I know it’s just a normal flu. And Kun is helping him recover, and Doyoung brought him broth and the others are taking care of him in there. I know you guys care for him too. I still can’t help but feel a bit…” he trails off, biting down on his lip.

“What is it?”

“Sometimes I feel like you ask too much of him. I think he’s been overusing his ability. He has a lot of pressure on him to provide what we need. His abilities are amazing, but it’s too much for one person to try and provide everything, all the time. I think he’s been burning himself out.”

Taeyong nods, slowly. “I worry about him too. He does a lot for us, and he’s always so willing. But we all have our limits.” He puts a hand on Jaemin’s shoulder, turns him until Jaemin can’t help but look him in the eye. “I’m sorry, I should’ve paid better attention. I’ll try and slow things down in future.”

“It’s not your fault. You can’t pay attention to everyone all at once. We should’ve come to you sooner, but Jeno doesn’t ever want to disappoint.”

“He never could. You neither, Jaemin. You guys always do your best.” He pats him on the shoulder. “I hope Sungchan’s story wasn’t too much, earlier?”

“It’s fine. That happens sometimes. It’s good to know he was telling his story honestly. Mark said that he’s bound to bring change, though.”

“Really?” Taeyong raises an eyebrow. “Any particular type of change?”

“To be concluded.”

“Of course,” he sighs. “That sounds about right. I suppose we should brace ourselves, then.”

Jaemin thinks of Renjun, sitting across from him at the dining table. No longer at the labs, but safely here with them. “It might not be so bad. I think we need some change around here.”

Taeyong nods, turning him back to the room and putting his arm loosely over Jaemin’s shoulders. “You may be right.” He pats the side of his head briefly before pulling away from him, leaving him by the bedroom door. “Sorry for pulling you away from your game. You can come to me any time, you know. Anything you need to talk about, I’m always around.”

“I know,” he says, and musters up a smile. “I will.”

“Good. Goodnight, Jaemin.”

When he enters the bedroom again, there’s soft music playing from the corner, and Yangyang has abandoned his team to dance with Ten in the free space of the room. He hadn’t heard Ten enter the bedroom behind them, but that’s not unusual—Ten is unnervingly light footed. Even now, as he twirls Yangyang under his arm, he barely makes a sound. Yangyang, on the other hand, is laughing loudly, taking Ten’s hands in his own and pulling him close with a beaming smile.

“Welcome back,” Jeno says, as Jaemin perches on the side of the bed next to him.

“At least your defector returns. We’re never getting Yangyang from the cat’s claws,” Donghyuck mutters, throwing the Yut Nori pieces rather too aggressively. One glance at the board between them tells Jaemin why.

“He doesn’t want to escape my claws,” Ten drawls, barely looking away from Yangyang to snip at Donghyuck. “I’m much more fun than you and your stick game.”

“I actually like hanging out with all of you guys,” Yangyang says, snaking his arms around Ten’s neck.

“Shh,” Ten says, leaning close and smiling wicked. “You like being with me the best.”

“We got you again,” Mark announces, moving the opposing team’s piece off the board. “It’s your turn.” Steam is starting to rise from Donghyuck’s ears.

“Are you sure you don’t have an advantage at these things?” Jaemin asks, and Mark just upturns his hands helplessly.

“Don’t think so. Maybe I’m just good?”

“Impossible,” Donghyuck mutters, watching Chenle throw the pieces. Only one yut stick lands right side up. “I think my team is just sabotaging me.”

“I’m not Korean, I don’t know what I’m doing,” Chenle complains, moving their piece along one space.

“You don’t need to be Korean to throw a better score than that.”

Jaemin slings an arm over Jeno’s waist, letting their bickering fade into the background. Jeno presses a kiss to the side of his head, and he wonders how much change Mark can see coming over the horizon. Enough to change all of this?

Maybe. It should make him afraid, because he doesn’t want to lose what he has. But he thinks they could stand to gain some things, too.

-

Jeno drops off to sleep again halfway through their game of Yut Nori, and Mark had been single-handedly annihilating Chenle and Donghyuck anyway, so they call it a night and settle in to sleep. Jeno has priority for the main bed along with Jaemin, and the others roll out their sleep mats on the bedroom floor. He’s just conscious enough to hear Jungwoo helping Sungchan set up his own space before bed, but when he wakes up early the next day to Kun checking Jeno’s temperature, Sungchan is gone, and there’s a slight tremoring rattling the room.

He finds him in the sports hall, sparring against Yuta. Chenle and Donghyuck are sitting to the side to observe, because they’re obsessed with practising against each other and anyone else they can drag along—though admittedly, their powers are stunning to watch in a fight. Sungchan, too, is impressive to watch—the feeling of the building shaking is from the rebound of Sungchan’s quakes against Yuta’s shields. Yuta is sweating, but maintaining his shimmering dome perfectly as Sungchan tries to crack it, presumably without tearing the sports hall in half.

Jeno’s fever had broken this morning, and he’d managed to get down most of the breakfast Kun had brought him, so he’s making good signs of recovery. But Jaemin had also held him as he cried out of sickness-induced weariness in the middle of the night, so he doesn’t intend to be away from him for long. Just enough time to get his own breakfast and check in on the shakes from the sports hall, ask them to tone it down a bit.

“Time!” Donghyuck calls out, and Sungchan retracts his hands, and the room stops quivering. He’s breathing hard, and Yuta wobbles slightly as he lowers his own hands, dome slipping away.

“You’re good,” he tells him as he sits down heavily on the bench. It’s a real compliment, coming from Yuta.

“Thanks,” Sungchan says, rubbing the back of his neck and coming to sit on the other side of Chenle. “SM had me in training a lot more than in testing. They liked to pair me up against Taeil, had us fight until we were exhausted.”

“I bet you two are a good match,” Dejun says from where he’d entered the room behind Jaemin. “Your powers aren’t too different.”

Sungchan nods, wiping his brow. “He’s reliant on taking the energy he uses from other places, which gives him a disadvantage. But if he gets in close quarters, gets his hands on you, it’s over. He can suck the energy out of you in seconds.”

“You work better in long range,” Yuta agrees, leaning back against the wall. “Though I expect you could do some significant damage up close, too.”

Sungchan looks at the floor, a sullen expression passing over his face. “I prefer not to. It’s hard to control. Things can go south really fast.”

Jaemin sees flashes of small objects in his hands exploding, of directing his vibration waves into small areas and being thrown back with the force of it. Of being in training, fighting against a soldier, having his head clutched in his hands, and being so afraid of—

Someone yanks at his arm, and he snaps out of it. Donghyuck is looking at him. “You’re doing it again.”

Sungchan is looking over too, apprehensive. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay.” He’s quick to reassure. The others have told him his expressions can be unnerving when flicking through uncomfortable memories, but it’s not anyone’s fault.

Ten pushes open the sports hall door and stands in front of them all, hands on his hips. “Doyoung sent me,” he says, blunt. “He said you need to stop shaking this building, so help me God, we’re supposed to be hiding from the government, not causing natural disasters, blah blah blah. Something like that.” He rolls his shoulders, stretching his arms out in front of him. “So who wants to spar with me instead?”

“Yes!” Chenle says immediately, standing and sticking his hand straight up in the air. “Me!”

“Always,” Donghyuck agrees. “Dejun? Give us even teams?”

“I’m beat from yesterday,” he grimaces. “I don’t want to go against Chenle again. I could ask Taeyong, though.”

“Yes,” Ten says, eyes gleaming. “Ask Taeyong.”

Jaemin is about to turn and go back upstairs, but he’s increasingly aware of Sungchan sitting next to him, shifting and glancing at Jaemin like he wants to say something. Yuta must sense it too, because he stands and leaves the room without a word, going after Dejun in the hunt for Taeyong. The other three move further into the room together, and Jaemin takes a tentative seat beside Sungchan.

“How are you settling in?” he asks, slightly awkward.

“Yeah, good,” Sungchan says, nodding. “I’m really lucky you guys found me. I wasn’t sure about all this at first, but now I can tell you’ve got a good thing, here.”

“We have,” he agrees. “I’m lucky to have them all, too. We’re family.”

Sungchan makes a noise of agreement, and then silence falls between them as they watch the other three argue over tactical teams. Chenle is over at the cupboard in the corner where his weapons are kept, holding a knife in one hand, testing a scythe in the other.

“I just wanted to apologise,” Sungchan blurts. “For yesterday. I don’t know if there’s a way to make things easier for you—”

“Oh, no, it’s okay,” he says, quickly. He’s glad this is his concern, and nothing worse. “It happens a lot when someone is recalling a vivid memory. Because you were telling us about something important, and because you’re adjusting to being in a new place, it seems loud to me. Once you adjust to being here and I get used to tuning you out, we’ll meet in the middle. I’m used to it happening, honestly.”

Sungchan nods without meeting his eyes, tapping his thighs restlessly. “It must suck. Not being able to turn your power off like that.”

“No one here can. Not really. They’re a part of us, whether we’re using them or not. It’s all about control, in the end.”

“I suppose so.”

“Trust me. I’ve thought about our abilities a lot, so I know I’m right.”

“Me too. I’ve only had myself and my thoughts for so long now. I almost forgot what it was like to actually talk about your ideas with people.”

Jaemin has some experience with isolation, too. He’d been put in a room on his own as punishment after the staff at SM had caught him rifling through their brains for answers. He’d wanted to know if his family had been turned away from visitation, or if they’d just stopped coming to see him. He’d wanted to know if SM had plans of ever letting them out into the world again, or if they’d go straight into the military. The others had been getting restless, too, everyone more wary of the scientists and their intentions after they’d started putting them through new surgeries and strange experiments and difficult training tasks. They’d all stopped wanting to be in the labs long ago, starting to feel more like lab rats than patients. Taeyong had asked him to investigate, see what he could learn.

They’d kept him in isolation for three weeks after that, in a building far away from everyone else. When he was let out, it was to discover that Taeyong had already escaped with Jeno and Chenle and the others. He’d missed a lot, trapped inside that little white room with only his own thoughts for company. He can’t imagine what two months of hiding and running all alone must have felt like.

“I’m sorry about your brother,” he says, because he can tell Sungchan’s memory had been a heavy one, something that still affects him. “And Lucas. You did your best to get them out.”

Sungchan stays very still for a moment. When he speaks, it sounds like a confession.

“They used to sedate Jaehyun a lot at first, you know. Just to make him stay. They were scared he would slip right through the wall and leave whenever he wanted. Jaehyun took it willingly, or would flush it out as soon as he was alone if he could. He really stayed by choice, because of me. My powers were unstable at the time, and we both came to SM to receive their training and help—and the training really did help. Taeil especially showed me how to direct my ability so much better than I could’ve done alone. But Jaehyun has always had amazing control over his ability, from the moment it appeared. He was only there because he didn’t want to leave me alone. He could’ve escaped on his own at any time, if he’d wanted to.” He kicks his feet out in front of him. “The fact that he didn’t leave after I got out—it means they caught on. They figured out a way to really trap him there. I know he would’ve escaped, brought the others with him if he could. He would’ve wanted to find me.”

“That’s not your fault. They did the same to all of us, especially after the first escape. They would’ve found a way to keep Jaehyun there too, sooner or later. It’s not your fault that your plan didn’t go as hoped.”

Sungchan scuffs his shoe against the floor, watching as Taeyong pops into the centre of the room. Ten turns to him, all cattish smile and sharp eyes. “It sure feels like my fault.”

Jaemin watches Chenle and Donghyuck take their positions on one side of the hall as Ten and Taeyong walk to the other. The match is about to start.

“I have a brother too, you know. I miss him so much. I was one of the few who went to SM voluntarily because my power was too much for me, too. I could see things, all the time, memories that weren’t mine. They were so loud and felt so real—I thought I was losing my mind. When I realised they weren’t hallucinations, but other people’s memories, I knew I had to get help. Find a way to control it.” He clasps his hands together, watching as Ten transforms into a great golden lion. “I went into the labs a few days before my brother had this performance. It was really important to him. He had a spot in a dance troupe that he really admired, and none of us had expected him to get it—he was their youngest member. He’s a hell of a dancer. Jisungie made me promise to go and see his first routine on stage.”

“It was impossible, right?”

He nods, mouth turned down. “Even if I hadn’t been in SM, I couldn’t have handled a crowd like that. My parents came to visit me a few days later, so I saw it in their memories, but it wasn’t the same. I wanted to be there, too. We’ve always been pretty close, for brothers, and I knew it hurt him that I wasn’t there.”

“You couldn’t have helped it.”

“I know. But I still feel guilty.” He pulls up the corner of his mouth in a half-smile. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. We might have regrets, but they aren’t our fault, and we can’t carry them around forever. We didn’t ask for these things to happen.”

“No,” Sungchan agrees. “But it’s hard not to feel like I could’ve done things differently.”

“Even if we have these crazy abilities, we’re still human. We make mistakes.”

Sungchan looks up at him. In the centre of the hall, the rapid-fire sound of Donghyuck’s explosions echo around the room as he comes into close quarters with Taeyong. “Did you ever make it up to your brother?”

He shakes his head. “I haven’t seen him since I went into the labs. SM didn’t want minors on site, and I haven’t been to see my family since escaping. None of us have had contact with our families. It would put them at too much risk.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. I’ll see them again someday. This can’t last forever. I feel worse for Jisung—Chenle is his best friend, and he came into SM only a few weeks after I did. Jisung is probably on a watchlist just for being linked with the two of us, and he did nothing. But his whole life has been turned around.”

“You could say the same for us.”

“Donghyuck blew up his parents’ vegetable patch twice before SM found him,” he points out. “Some of us did a bit more than nothing.”

“They were accidents!” Donghyuck shouts, propelling himself into the air with the force of twin blasts from his hands. He’s come so far with his powers in only a few months, and learned so much more in the hideout than he did in his time at SM.

“Tell that to the poor cabbages!” he calls back.

The speakers in the corner of the room crackle to life, and Jaemin stands, immediately alert. They’d agreed only to use the school speakers in emergencies, and he’s only heard it three times before—twice when strangers were approaching the building, and Jaemin had been needed to send them away, and once when Hendery had found them, brazenly knocking on their front door. Jaemin had been sent out to deter him too, but had found some more interesting intent in his memories.

Hendery’s voice fills the room now, muffled by the echo of Donghyuck’s last blast. “Everyone meet in the sports hall, now. I have something big.”

Ten and Chenle come to a stop in the middle of the room, Chenle clinging to Ten’s back with his arms around his neck, before Ten transforms back into his human form. Taeyong has already gone, and Donghyuck climbs over the wreckage of a roadblock in the middle of the hall, shaking ash from his hair. “What the hell was that?”

The sports hall door opens, and Yuta sweeps in, looking around at them. “What’s going on?”

Jungwoo follows right after him, and the rest of their runaway commune isn’t far behind. Taeyong appears with Dejun and Kun in each hand, everyone chattering and asking anxious questions as they arrive. Hendery and Yangyang arrive last, after Doyoung with a bleary-eyed Jeno.

Jaemin beckons Jeno over instantly, pulling him to sit down on the bench and lean on his shoulder. He doesn’t like that he’s out of bed, but he knows Jeno would hate to miss important news.

“What is it?” Taeyong asks, facing Hendery with wide eyes. The others are forming a semicircle around him, some sat on the bench, others standing and waiting. “Did your lead work?”

“Yes,” Hendery grins, bright and breathless. “I found them.”

“SM?” Doyoung asks quickly. “The others?”

“The truck led me right to them. I did some checks for activity in the area—they’re getting good at covering their tracks, but the new location is fairly urban. People in the area have been reporting lights flickering for weeks, strange power surges or outages. That’s consistent with what you’ve told me about Taeil’s ability, right?”

“Not to that sort of scale,” Taeyong frowns. “Unless they’ve been pushing him to his limits.”

“I’m confident that they’re in there,” Hendery assures him. “The building used to be a youth detention centre—SM repurposed it last month, and there’s been heavier traffic into the area since then. People coming and going to that building, but with no indication of what’s actually going on in there. As far as the public know, the detention centre is still shut for renovations.”

“Where is it? The centre?” Taeyong asks, and Hendery beckons him over to look at the tablet he’s holding.

“What does this mean?” Kun asks. “What do we do with this information?”

“We get them out,” Ten says, Chenle nodding vigorously over his shoulder. “This is what we’ve been waiting for.”

“That can’t be right,” Taeyong says, and all eyes snap back to him.

“What?” Doyoung’s voice is sharp.

“I’ve been there,” he says, pointing at Hendery’s tablet screen. “I had this friend in high school—Hansol. Real troublemaker. He ended up in this exact detention centre for three months when I was fifteen. I went and visited him there.”

Yangyang squints at the screen. “I don’t get it. How does that make Hendery’s information wrong?”

“Perhaps it’s not wrong,” Taeyong says, eyebrows pinched together. “But it makes no sense. I can only teleport into places I’ve been to before, and SM knows this. Surely if they’re going to all this effort to move the others just so that we can’t get to them, they’d check a new place thoroughly to make sure I have no connections to it.” He jabs a finger at the screen. “I could get into this place right now. If they’re keeping anyone in the old visitation room, I could grab them and go in seconds.”

“Then let’s do it,” Donghyuck says. “Right now.”

“No, Taeyong is right,” Doyoung says, frowning hard. “This makes no sense. How could they make a mistake like that?”

“How obscure is it to know that Taeyong visited the place once, ten years ago? It’s probably an honest mistake,” Chenle says. “We can take advantage of this.”

“We need to think before we do anything,” Jungwoo says. “Is it possible this could be a set up?”

“If it is, they’ve made it hard enough to find all this out,” Hendery says. “We’ve had months of no news, and it’s not like this just dropped into my lap. It’s a direct result of the close call with Sungchan.”

Sungchan himself stands up from the bench, and everyone pauses to look at him. “It’s a trap,” he says, absolute certainty in his voice.

Taeyong steps up to him, holding his gaze. “Why do you think that?”

Sungchan clenches and unclenches his hands into fists, looking around anxiously. “I think they knew you would try to come back for the others. They’ve been preparing.”

“How?”

“Before I left, they were experimenting with new things. I didn’t see it myself, but Jaehyun—he told me that, um…”

“I think they’re trying to control us,” Jaehyun whispers, in Sungchan’s memory. “Johnny told me that he was taken into testing yesterday morning, and he doesn’t remember anything from it. He woke up on the floor, not knowing where he was. The room was shredded to pieces, and he thinks he did it without knowing.”

“What?” he says, holding onto Jaehyun’s shoulders. His brother had slipped into his room in the middle of the night to tell him this—a risky move he’d only done once before.

“They made him do it without him knowing, Sungchan. They did something to him, and he’s afraid of it. He told me he wants to leave. It’s time for us all to get out of here.”

Jaemin breathes in, sharp, staring straight at Sungchan. “No.”

“What is it?” Doyoung asks, urgent.

“Mind control,” Sungchan says, looking straight at Jaemin. “They were trying to control us.”

Jaemin sinks his head into his hands. One of Jeno’s hands loosely circles his forearm, and Jaemin focuses in on the touch, tuning out the burst of noise that follows Sungchan’s revelation.

No. Not this. Anything but this. If they have Renjun, if they have Johnny and Taeil and Lucas doing whatever they want without even knowing it, they’ve won. If this is true, it means SM have what they’ve always wanted—access to their abilities, ways to do terrible things with them. He knows that Renjun would rather die than have someone use him like that.

“This can’t be real,” Ten says, his voice carrying above the noise. “How could they possibly do that?”

“If they managed to harness Renjun’s ability, they could do it,” Jeno points out.

“Use his own ability against him? They tried for months to take our powers from us. Took samples from just about every part of us, but they could never duplicate it.”

“We’ve been away for a long time,” Taeyong reasons. “They could have figured something out since then.”

“What exactly did Jaehyun tell you about this?” Doyoung says, stepping closer to Sungchan, looking at him imploringly. “Had he seen it, or could this be a rumour?”

“He told me that Johnny had experienced it. Johnny had come to him, asking him to get them all out as soon as possible, because he was afraid. Sicheng had told us before that he was losing memories of their experiments, too.”

Mark sinks down onto the bench beside him, staring straight ahead. “If Johnny is afraid, we should be afraid. He’s the strongest of all of us.”

Donghyuck’s eyes glint like fire. “If they can do something like that to someone like Johnny, it’s game over. He’d snap our necks before you could even zap him out of there, Hyung.”

“Don’t say it like that,” Mark snaps, and Donghyuck just looks at him. “God, that would ruin him.”

“Let’s remember that we’re working with a third-hand story, here,” Jungwoo pitches in, anxious. “We need clearer information about this before we do anything about it.”

“You’re right,” Jaemin says, suddenly standing, and Jeno jolts with the movement of it. It draws everyone else’s attention to him, too. “We need more information. We should go there.”

“What are you talking about?” Kun asks, sharp. “We can’t just barge in with no plan.”

“If you can get me close to the building, I can reach out to the others and see what they can remember. We don’t need to actually go in and raise any alarms. I can find out from them what’s been happening, and we can make proper plans based on that. No one needs to know we were ever there.”

There’s a beat of silence after he speaks, but Taeyong is nodding. “You’re right. We can take Doyoung for cover.”

“Hang on,” Doyoung says, half-laughing, throwing his hands into the air. “Are we really doing this? Sungchan is sure this is a trap, but we’re going anyway?”

“We’ll stay hidden,” Taeyong says, turning to face him. “You can do a disguise like that, I know you can. Make us look like part of the wall, or something.”

“I certainly can,” Doyoung says. “But if they’re waiting for us, we might not be able to get away with it that easily. It’ll take me at least a few seconds to set up an illusion over all three of us, and it’s been ten years since you visited this place—everything could have changed. It’s a big risk.”

“It is,” Jaemin agrees. “But we have to do it anyway. This could be our only chance to get them out. I know their minds well—I’ll be able to reach Renjun or Taeil at the very least, if they’re in there. We can go and come back without making any waves.”

There’s silence, then, as Jaemin looks at him and Doyoung looks right back. Everyone else around them is watching, too.

“Mark?” Doyoung says, eventually. “What do you think? Should we go?”

Mark is slumped against the wall when everyone turns to face him. He’s fiddling with his fingers on his lap, and he rolls his shoulders, swallowing uncomfortably under the attention. “I can’t tell you what you should do. I can only tell you what the result will be once you actually start doing it.”

“Then tell us what you think,” Taeyong says. “In your own mind.”

“I think you should go,” he says, simply. “We should at least know if they’re in there, if they’re alive and well. Then we can decide what to do afterwards.”

Taeyong smiles at him, small and proud. “Let’s vote. Hands up if you’re in favour of Jaemin’s recon mission.”

Jaemin turns, hope swelling in his chest as he sees everyone raise one hand in the air. Everyone aside from Doyoung, and strangely, Jeno.

Jaemin looks down at his boyfriend in surprise. “Jeno?”

Jeno knocks his head back against the wall, eyes shining. He presses his lips together in a thin line, shaking his head. “I don’t want you to go back there.”

Kun is by his side in a second, back of his hand against his forehead. “I think you need to go back to bed, Jeno,” he says, gently. “Your temperature is rising again.”

Jaemin comes to sit at his other side, wiping away the tear that slips from his eye. “I’m not going back in there, baby,” he says, cupping his face in both hands. “I promise we’ll be careful. Taeyong can take us away the second anything seems off.”

“Of course,” Taeyong says. “We’ll make sure to keep well away from danger. I’ll keep them safe, Jeno.”

“I’ll be able to reach out to Renjun,” Jaemin says, voice low. “I can tell him we’re alright, and he can show me if he’s okay, too. Isn’t the risk worth it for that?”

Jeno rests his head against Jaemin’s shoulder, crying unabashedly, now. It’s how he can tell Jeno is utterly exhausted, and still sick, because he’s never one for crying in front of other people if he can help it.

“Yes,” he croaks. “It is. I’m just afraid.”

“Me too,” Doyoung admits. “I’ve been afraid they would find us again ever since we left that place. And now we’re going straight back into their arms.”

“I’m not going to pressure you into it if you don’t want to,” Taeyong says. “We can come up with something else.”

“No,” Doyoung sighs. “Jaemin is right. This is the best way to get information. I’ll do it, but I want you to know that I don’t like it.”

“Thank you, Hyung,” Jaemin says, from where he’s caressing Jeno’s hair with reassuring strokes. “Thank you. I won’t let you down.”

“I know you won’t. We’re not doing it until tonight, though,” he says, firm. “It’s safer under dark. And I need to practise my convincing brick wall.”

-

Jaemin isn’t, and has never been, a telepath. He can’t understand people’s thoughts at all—if he looks hard, he can see them, but they never make any sense. People think in abstract concepts, or in half-formed ideas, or vague images referencing their own past. Thoughts are always too quick and too complex for him to make any sense of at all. He can’t read minds for shit.

Memories, though. They’re different. Seeing someone’s memory is like watching a video, and often feels more vivid than that—if the memory is strong, it’s like he’s really there. Sometimes he wonders if his power is closer to Taeyong’s, if he can actually travel into the past for a few minutes at a time. People with bad recall captivate him too, leaving him to fill in the blanks, flick back through memories until he can make sense of what they do remember. He’s gotten good at thumbing through memories like they’re pages of a book.

SM taught him that trick. While Jaemin wanted to run away from the very idea of mind-reading, they pushed him to use his ability for more than the involuntary movie showings he was experiencing at the time, taught him to find things instead—to delve into someone’s mind, pull out a memory, inspect it. Push in deeper to find something specific he’s looking for. He and Renjun had developed that skill into a system of communication between them. They’d been roommates for a long time in the labs, and Renjun was always interested in how far Jaemin could use his ability for more than just prying. The ability to edit a memory was his suggestion in the first place—but first, they had to control the way that Jaemin parsed through someone’s mind, see if it was possible to translate memories into messages.

The others are used to it, now. He’s a big fan of replaying the cabbage patch incident for Donghyuck whenever he’s being annoying. If Yangyang suddenly remembers looking at his empty glass, he knows it’s a prompt to bring Jaemin some water. When it comes to more complicated messages, it can be hard to get the intent across with memories alone, but if anyone can understand what he needs to learn right now, it’s Renjun.

They regroup in the sports hall at midnight, where Jeno hugs him, long and hard. Chenle and Kun get hugs too, and then Mark and Donghyuck want in, Taeyong pulling him away from Yangyang and Jungwoo to gently remind them that they shouldn’t put this off for much longer. Jaemin generally struggles to wake up sleeping minds, so they need the others to be awake when they arrive, and night curfew in the labs was over an hour ago. He knows his mission—find out what he can about the mind control situation, and who exactly is there in the labs. See if they’re okay, if it’s possible to get them out. Don’t be seen, don’t raise the alarm. Get back home safely.

He winks and blows Jeno a kiss before he grasps Taeyong’s hand, reassured by the fact that Kun is at his side. Jeno is giving him a small, weary smile right as the air snaps by his ears, and they disappear from the sports hall together, reappearing against the side of a plain, run-down office building.

“Where is it?” Doyoung asks, barely audible from Taeyong’s other side. All the other structures around them seem to be similar non-descript brick buildings.

“It’s the one at the end of the road. How close do you need to be, Jaemin?”

“Closer than this. It helps if I’m closer to them than anyone else, and there are people working in these buildings.” He can sense their minds, just out of reach, humming with tired activity. His heart rises to his throat at the thought of Renjun being so close, just in in reach of Jaemin’s ability. Just out of reach of his touch.

“Can you cover us as we move?” Taeyong asks Doyoung.

“Stay close to the wall and no one should notice anything. Duck under any windows. Jaemin, tell us when you’re close enough.”

He nods, and the three of them sneak beside the building in single file, Jaemin in the lead, linked by their hands in case a quick getaway is needed.

The buildings towards the end of the street are a lot quieter, void of people inside as far as he can tell. Perhaps SM had emptied them out, anticipating noisy training sessions and nosy neighbours. Whatever the reason, it means they’re close enough by the time they reach an abandoned building at the corner of the street, over the road from the detention centre. Jaemin tentatively feels out with his ability, and the warm glow of Renjun and Johnny’s minds greet him up ahead, louder and more familiar than anything else in the building.

“This is good enough,” he says. “Can we stop here?”

“This is fine. Let’s crouch, okay?”

He squats down, getting comfortable enough against the wall as Doyoung and Taeyong stay on their heels, alert.

“Don’t rush yourself, okay?” Doyoung whispers. “And be careful.”

“I know,” he breathes, squeezing Taeyong’s hand and shutting his eyes. “I’ll try.”

It’s so, so easy to slip into Renjun’s mind. It helps that he’s already recalling a memory for himself, a final comfort before he falls asleep, a beacon for Jaemin to follow. It certainly helps that it’s a memory of Jeno, and he can’t help but be drawn over, like moth to flame.

Long ago, before SM had started the more invasive tests and the stricter lab rules, before they were cutting off visitors and locking them in their rooms at night, he and the other kids had been allowed to have social time together. They had video game consoles and a TV and all the snacks they wanted. It had felt like he was at camp with his friends, sometimes. This memory is from that time, simple and golden—Renjun is wrestling Jeno for control of the TV remote, because Jeno wants to watch the rerun of Boys over Flowers, and Renjun is making fun of him for being into super sappy dramas, Jeno, when the staff brought us the Black Panther DVD yesterday!

He ends up pushing Jeno onto the floor and climbing over him until his knee presses against Jeno’s chest, but Jeno continues to hold the remote out of his reach over his head.

“Why do you want to see this so badly?” Renjun demands, planting his hands on the floor beside Jeno’s head. “You just said that you’ve already seen it!”

“It’s not me that wants to see it,” he says, grinning. “Jaemin will be here in a minute, and he’s been talking about the reruns since before we even came to SM.”

“But you would rather watch Black Panther, right?”

“Yeah. But Jaemin misses home, so I want him to have this.”

He and Jeno still, looking at each other for a few moments. Then Renjun leaps up, snatching the remote from Jeno’s hand.

“What’s going on here?” he sees himself ask, leaning against the doorway of the lounge room, arms crossed. “My roommate and my boyfriend are wrestling behind my back? That’s pretty sexy.”

“Did you want to see more of it?” Jeno asks, hopefully.

“Absolutely,” Jaemin grins, and God, it’s been a while since he last smiled like that. “But that’s up to Renjun.”

The two of them look at him, and Renjun looks between them. This is the very beginning of their three-way arrangement, the early days of their relationship.

“I think we should watch Boys over Flowers,” Renjun announces, and Jaemin’s eyes are bright, and Jeno makes a disbelieving noise from the floor.

Jaemin—the Jaemin of now, feeling through Renjun’s mind—tugs the rug out from under their feet, switching it up fast. He drags Renjun forward, into another time, and he knows this movement will alert Renjun to the fact that he’s not the only one present in his memories.

This is the day he’d been let out of isolation and taken back to the labs, pushed into the dining hall and left there. Renjun immediately stands from his seat when he hears the noise of the dining hall doors opening, of someone stumbling through. He’s wearing his blindfold, though, and it’s disorienting to have no vision in this memory, but Jaemin can remember what had happened from his perspective with clarity.

Renjun had stood there, tense, until Lucas had also leapt up from his seat to bound over to him. “Jaemin!”

He’d picked him up in a strong hug, warm and enveloping and exactly what Jaemin had needed after three weeks of solitude. Donghyuck had run over to him too, and Jaemin thought he might cry at the sight of him. At the sight of all of them.

“Jaemin?” Renjun says, feeling his way along the table, hands out in front of him, trying to head in the right direction. Mark hops out of his seat to take Renjun’s hands, guiding him across the room to Jaemin. “You’re still here?”

“What happened?” Jaemin says, voice rough, grasping Donghyuck’s wrist with one hand. “Renjun? Why do you have that on?”

He remembers the damn blindfold—tied tight, attached at the back to a thin, metallic collar around his neck. To stop him taking him off, he can tell, but why? What did Renjun do?

Nothing, he knows now. The institute had just become more afraid of all of them—Johnny was made to wear wearing huge weighted shoes and wristbands, Taeil clad in heavy dampening clothing. Dejun had spent every meal after that barely able to stomach anything, half-asleep at the table, Donghyuck often in a similarly drugged state.

He moves through memories again. He doesn’t want to spend too long in this memory, as much as he was glad to be back with friends. He has a message to convey.

Forward again, to the night of his rescue from the labs. Renjun hears Jaemin jerk upwards on the other side of their bedroom, whole body tense, eyes wide, listening to something. He’s silent for a while, and Renjun doesn’t ask.

Then Jaemin turns to him, eyes bright, grinning wide. “Renjun!” he hisses. “It’s Taeyong! He’s outside!”

Renjun sits up then, looking over at him. “What?”

“He showed me a memory.” Past Jaemin couldn’t stop smiling. He remembers seeing Jeno in Taeyong’s memory, explaining their plan, a perfect message for Jaemin. “They’re coming here to get us, tomorrow. They’re going to get us all out.”

He stops the vision, exactly then, like pressing pause on the remote. That’s the message. We’re here, we’re coming to get you out.

It’s Renjun who speeds forwards in the memory, and Jaemin’s heart jumps. He’s there, listening to him. He’s talking back.

“How are they going to get everyone out? If they storm the dining room, they’ll be shut down too quickly.”

“They’re planning to sneak in and get everyone out subtly. We need to try and pass on the message tomorrow so everyone is ready.”

Renjun looks at him. “It’s dangerous.” Memory stopped.

Another message. Jaemin frowns. Of course it’s dangerous—but doesn’t Renjun remember what he had told him in reply?

“But it’s worth it, if we can leave this place,” he whispers into the dark.

Renjun speeds back again, to the memory from before, Jaemin’s return after isolation. The switch up makes him dizzy. Renjun makes his way across the dining hall, vision black, but when he hugs Jaemin, it feels familiar. “Are you okay?” he asks. The memory stops.

Jaemin smiles, feeling Renjun’s warming energy around him.

“I’m okay,” past Jaemin says. He puts his hands to Renjun’s face, and Renjun leans into the touch. “What about you?”

A pause. He can feel hesitance in it. Then they’re going forward, forward—

Renjun is sitting in a room. His vision is fuzzy. There’s a recording playing, the same words over and over— _you will obey orders, you will obey orders, you will obey orders_ —

Forward again. Black vision, but Taeil is talking to him, and he can feel the canteen seats underneath him.

“They’ve done it,” Taeil is saying, and he sounds exhausted. “Lucas couldn’t remember that we fought. It’s like he wasn’t there at all.”

“It’s ironic, really,” Renjun says. He’s hungry, but he won’t eat. “After all that fuss about my ability, they figured out how to do it for themselves.”

Jaemin feels himself shiver, though his body seems far away right now. Sungchan had been right—whatever they’re developing is effective, and has been used on at least three of their friends, now. Jaemin shifts through Renjun’s memories for similar visions but comes up with nothing. Renjun doesn’t remember being controlled like that, but he has gaps, long stretches of time that leave him with headaches. That memory is the clearest evidence he has— _you will obey orders, you will obey orders, you will obey orders._

So Jaemin takes them elsewhere. To a late-night discussion they’d had, once.

“Your ability is powerful, Renjun,” he had told him. “But you’re also good. So, so good. That’s where you have your real power. I’m so glad you’re the only one with an ability like yours.”

Renjun had just hummed, then, but Jaemin hopes he listens now. Despite what SM have done, or what they might be planning to do, Renjun is still Renjun. He’s still good.

For a few moments, they stay there, basking in the warmth of that memory. Their talks were the only thing that got him through those few months, after Jeno had left and before Taeyong had come back for them.

Then they’re back again, to the earlier memory. Jaemin, fresh out of isolation, sits next to Renjun, Renjun’s hand on his thigh.

“I missed you,” he says. Freeze.

He’s getting dizzy from all the movement, head pounding from the strain on his ability. He’s only ever tried having a conversation this long once or twice before, both with Renjun, both months and months ago.

“I missed you so much,” he hears himself admit from beyond Renjun’s blindfold. “All of you. I don’t want to be away from any of you for that long again.”

If only he’d known.

He takes them both back, back, to the day Donghyuck had been brought in. “Did you hear there’s a new kid?” Pause. His final question—and Renjun faithfully roots around for an answer.

He drags up his memory of meeting Jaehyun, a rare occasion of seeing his face, followed by snippets of a conversation with Sicheng in Chinese. Then, more recently, he sits in the dining hall, and someone is speaking in Japanese. Johnny is doing his best with his limited phrases, but none of them can really understand what the kid is trying to tell them. There’s someone else there too, very new, but he doesn’t speak when the others ask him questions. Renjun doesn’t know his name. Two new recruits to report, then.

He can sense Renjun’s fear bleeding through the memories. He suddenly shows Jaemin a flash of Taeil’s voice saying, _they could do terrible things with this._

He knows what that means. Renjun doesn’t want them to come, not when it’s so dangerous. He doesn’t want them to risk their lives for this.

So Jaemin takes them back, one last time.

“Hey,” Jaemin says, sliding into bed with Renjun. He slings an arm over his chest, buries his head into the crook of his neck. “You know that I love you, right?”

Renjun turns his head to face him, Jaemin’s hair tickling his cheek. “Like I could miss it when you squeeze me half to death every day and call it love,” he says, turning to hold him. “What brought this on?”

“Mark,” Jaemin admits, fingers sliding under the sleeve of Renjun’s shirt to loosely grip his arm. “He said something ominous today.”

“He does that most days.”

“He was more specific, today. He said that some of us would be split up, soon.”

Renjun closes his eyes. “Oh. That is more ominous than usual.”

“Yeah.”

Silence.

“I love you too.”

Jaemin pulls back, detaching from the glow of Renjun’s mind on that last, good note. He doesn’t want to back away and leave Renjun alone, but he has to finish the mission, has to find out as much as he can. For the sake of his friends as well as his own.

When he stretches, he can feel Taeil’s mind in the next room—can just about see the faint outlines of a dream. Lucas lies beyond that, sleeping soundly, but his mind is so bright he would recognise it anywhere. He’s glad SM didn’t manage to take that from him, after all this time.

Then he finds a waking mind—unfamiliar, but in the same area as the others, which must be the bedrooms. He probes it cautiously, delving in to see if any memories are there for him to view without poking around. He doesn’t want to alarm a guard.

There’s something. A woman speaking to him in Japanese, kind, familiar, and he pushes forwards with more confidence. He finds himself in a white room, where the air around him crackles in a way that raises goosebumps on his arms—this kid is definitely one of them.

Jaemin thumbs through his memories, like he’s used to, like he’s good at—but it’s confusing. So many memories are distorted, or distant, like they happened a long time ago, though this boy can’t be much older than Jaemin. It’s always difficult to follow memories in a foreign language, but this seems like something else. Memories overlapping, images distorting—this guy can remember riding a bike for the first time with his brother, in a back street, but also with his mother, in a garden. They’re both true. How can they both be true?

“Shotaro,” a man in a more recent memory says, and Jaemin recognises him. He was a scientist who’d worked at SM while Jaemin was still there, assigned to work with Taeyong, primarily. He talks to him firmly, but Shotaro doesn’t understand it, so he doesn’t remember the words well. The air crackles again, and he sees distorted visions of a park.

Jaemin tears himself away. He doesn’t understand most of what he saw, and he can’t stick around to figure it out, but he knows that Shotaro has a good heart. His memories are focused on family. That’s good enough for him.

He moves past him to some more sleeping minds, vague in his vision—they must be Jaehyun and Sicheng, maybe the other recruit, too—and ends up at Johnny’s drowsy mind. He launches straight into a memory to wake him up.

It had become hard to keep track of the days at some point, doing the same thing in SM day after day, but Donghyuck had always been good at odd things like that. “It’s Johnny’s birthday today,” he had proclaimed one day, his breakfast tray clattering on the table. “He’s old now.”

“Hyung!” Mark says, accusing. “Why didn’t you say something?”

“I didn’t know myself,” Johnny replies, laughing. He turns to Donghyuck, bemused. “How do you know that?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Donghyuck says, raising his cup with a wink.

Jaemin, sat on Johnny’s left, throws his arms around his shoulders, his legs over Johnny’s lap. “Happy Birthday, Hyung!” he says. “Your present is me!”

Johnny’s memory becomes tinged with surprise, and Jaemin can tell he’s recognising Jaemin’s influence in his mind, so Jaemin launches right into it. He skims through Johnny’s memories quickly, searching for information on the newest recruit, the one that doesn’t speak.

When he lands, he feels his heart stop.

Jisung sits across from Johnny at the dinner table, staring down at his food. There are dark circles underneath his eyes, his hair is too long, and he’s grown several inches since Jaemin had last seen him. It physically hurts to look at him, afraid and alone in that place, makes Jaemin feel short of breath. Distantly, he can feel someone gripping his arm, but he’s so far gone from his body at this point. It’s all he can do to cling to Johnny’s memory and watch Jisung sit there, curled in on himself, hands balled into his chest.

“What’s your name, kiddo?” Johnny tries to ask, but Jisung doesn’t even look up at him. Taeil and Johnny share a glance.

“You should at least eat,” Taeil says, gently. “You don’t have to say anything, if you don’t want to. But don’t starve yourself.”

Jisung twitches, staring down the spoon in front of him. He looks wanting.

“It’s okay,” Taeil says. “Are you afraid? Whatever it is you can do, we won’t tell anyone if something happens. But they won’t like it if you refuse to eat.”

Jisung looks up at him then, and Johnny watches, curious. He can feel the others around the table holding their breath, too.

It takes a long moment of hesitation, but eventually, Jisung reaches out for the spoon when he thinks no one is looking at him. Takes it delicately, between two fingers. He’s shaking all over.

The second he touches it, the spoon dissolves into dust.

Jaemin tears himself away from Johnny’s memory. If Jisung is here, he should be able to find him. Jisung’s mind was the very first one he knew, back when his own power was beginning, when he was confused and out of control just like that. Even if he’s sleeping, he should be able to recognise his own brother.

He goes back, but the two sleeping minds from before must be Sicheng and Jaehyun because he can barely register them. He moves, reaching out for someone else, flits past the vague forms of guards and scientists and other unfamiliar minds. He’s not here, not amongst any of them, it’s just stranger after stranger and the endless twisting corridors of the building layout. But he must be here somewhere. He knows it.

It’s not until he flits by flashes of a memory does he stop. Someone, some guard or staff member is remembering the way they left Jisung in a dark, cold room, guilt marring the image.

He stops. Takes a deep breath. Points his vision down, deeper, to the sub-levels of the building, and three more minds emerge—two guards, and then Jisung, asleep in the basement room. He’s not dreaming, but so familiar that Jaemin can still see him clearly, his mind frayed and tired around the edges. Jaemin wants to cup it in both hands, ease it back to the life it was before. Take him far away from here.

Someone is really gripping him now. Taeyong’s voice, from far away, is telling him that they have to go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much to everyone who left comments on chapter 1! i was so surprised and pleased that people were showing interest in just that little segment and i'm so grateful for every single one even if i'm not replying, comments are just so gratifying for a writer to receive <3 i hope you like chapter 2 as well! i'm planning on updating this work every 6 days or so and having the whole thing posted by the end of jan, but we'll see how the rest of editing goes. i'd love to hear your thoughts on this chapter too :)


	3. Hendery

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A recap of the abilities revealed so far:  
> Taeyong: Teleportation  
> Jungwoo: Super speed  
> Sungchan: Vibrations/quakes  
> Hendery: Technopath  
> Ten: Cat shapeshifting  
> Yangyang: No power  
> Jeno: Material manipulation  
> Jaemin: Memory manipulation/exploration  
> Dejun: Weather creation/manipulation  
> Donghyuck: Explosions  
> Chenle: Superhuman combat abilities  
> Mark: Foresight  
> Kun: Healing  
> Doyoung: Illusions  
> Jaehyun: Density manipulation  
> Sicheng: Empath/mood manipulation  
> Lucas: Unbreakable body  
> Johnny: Super strength  
> Yuta: Force fields  
> Taeil: Energy manipulation  
> Renjun: Compulsion - mind/body control  
> Jisung: Disintegration

Jaemin is half catatonic when the three of them snap back into the room, trembling all over and leaning heavily on Taeyong, who lowers him to the floor. Jeno, who had been furiously tapping his foot the whole time they were gone, rushes over to kneel at his side.

“Jaemin? What happened?” he swivels around to Taeyong and Doyoung, imploring, but they both look utterly lost, too.

Jaemin lies back on the floor, staring up at the ceiling without blinking, not seeming to register that they’re back. Taeyong leans over him, cupping his face, firmly repeating his name.

“Jaemin? Jaemin, I need you to hear my voice and come back. Listen to me, Jaemin.”

“I think he went too far,” Doyoung explains, hands shaking. “He was out of it for a while, but only as much as he normally gets zoned out, you know—but then he started shaking and panicking, and he wasn’t snapping back to it when we called to him—we decided to go, because we were being too noisy, but I’m afraid we might have taken him away too suddenly.”

“Jaemin, if you can hear me, squeeze my hand,” Taeyong continues, latching their hands together.

Everyone in the hall watches with bated breath as Taeyong hovers over Jaemin. Then he nods, voice soft and encouraging. “That’s good, Jaemin. It’s okay if you’re not fully back, take it slow. You’re doing well.”

They watch and wait as Jaemin’s breathing slowly evens out. It’s hard to hear his breath rattle around in his chest, to watch his eyes water as he stares straight ahead. His lips twitch slightly, and a small noise comes out.

“Jaemin,” Jeno says, finally, relief flooding his voice. “It’s okay, we’re here. You’re getting there.”

“No one saw you, did they?” Hendery asks Doyoung quietly, who shakes his head. He’ll run some scans later to be sure, but he trusts Doyoung’s judgement well enough.

Jaemin’s eyes close, and then his head lolls to the side, eyelids fluttering open again. Exhales in a short, loud breath, and coughs. Jeno carefully wipes the drool from his mouth with his sleeve.

“Do you want to sit up?” Taeyong asks, and Jaemin makes a noise of agreement in his throat, so he and Jeno each take an arm and pull him upright. Donghyuck is already bringing over one of the stacked-up school chairs from the corner of the room.

“There you go, you’re okay,” Taeyong says, half lifting him into the chair. “How are you feeling?”

Jaemin swallows, shaking his head. He breathes in, then breathes out, shaky. “Not as bad as them.”

“What did you see?” Mark asks, tentatively. “Is anyone…. are they all alive?”

Jaemin closes his eyes, nodding. “Yes. They’re all there, with Jaehyun and Sicheng and two new recruits.”

“Who were they?”

“One was a Japanese boy. Shotaro. His power was… confusing, but it seemed similar to Taeyong’s.”

Hendery takes in a breath. Another teleporter, or something similar? That’s a big game-changer if SM have something like that under their influence. But it could be something powerful to have on their side, too.

“And the other?” Kun asks.

Jaemin’s face falls. “The other one… is my brother.”

Chenle abruptly stands from the bench with a loud scraping noise, staring at Jaemin with wide, fearful eyes. “Jisung?”

“His power…” Jaemin’s face crumples, on the verge of tears. “He… he can destroy things with his touch.”

Well. Shit. That one’s pretty bad.

“Oh, Jaemin,” Doyoung says, crouching beside him and resting a hand on his knee. “I’m so sorry.”

Jaemin’s head drops again, and he lets out a wet, distraught sob. Jeno wraps his arms around Jaemin’s shoulders, murmuring to him, and Chenle stands in frozen shock as Kun hugs him close to his side, too.

The tea that Mark and Dejun had prepared— _they’re going to need it when they come back,_ Mark had said earlier—is steaming on the table at the side of the room. Yuta goes over now and starts pouring out three mugs of it. Picks two up carefully, then comes to Jaemin’s side, handing one to Taeyong and the other to Jaemin.

“Jaemin,” he says, voice level. “I know you’re upset. I’m sorry about your brother. But it’s important you tell us what you can now, while it’s fresh in your mind. The sooner you tell us, the sooner you can go to bed and sleep this off.”

Jaemin lifts his head again, looking thoroughly exhausted, and breathes in deeply a few times to calm himself. He accepts the mug from Yuta with red eyes, takes a sip, then rests it against his thigh.

“Yes,” he says. “I know. I’ll tell you what I can, but it isn’t much.”

“Good. Thank you. I think the thing we’re all wondering is if you saw anything about mind control. Shall we start with that? Who did you manage to contact?”

“I spoke to Renjun mostly, then I saw Shotaro and Johnny. Everyone else was asleep.”

“If anyone knows about the mind control, it would be Renjun, right?” Jungwoo says, but Jaemin shakes his head.

“That’s just the thing. It’s not related to his ability. Renjun said that SM had developed some sort of control of their own. He showed me a memory of being in a dark room—he was drugged, I think, disoriented. There was a recording playing instructions on a loop. Other than that, his memories are really fuzzy. Long gaps where there should be full days.”

Yuta rests back on his heels, and he can see Doyoung deflating beside him too. “So they can really do it. It works?”

“Yes. It’s been used on Renjun, Johnny and Lucas at the very least, but I think it’s safe to assume that SM would use this on all of them.”

“That’s the more traditional route, isn’t it?” Hendery remarks. “Classic brainwashing techniques.”

“Brainwashing,” Ten says, disbelieving. “I hate this.”

“It makes sense for them to try and implement something like this,” Donghyuck says. “They knew we would come back for the others eventually. Why not have them ready to fight for themselves? It totally weaponizes them, and not just for military reasons. If we go back in for them, they’ll fight us, and that gives SM a shot at capturing us back, too. A whole army wouldn’t be enough to catch Jungwoo, but one Taeil hopped up on brainwashing drugs might be able to do it. It’s the perfect trap.”

Jungwoo’s usually soft face is stony, anxious. “If they can do something like that to Renjun, isn’t it over for all of us? Can we even go against them with his power on their side?”

Hendery raises a hand in the air. “Excuse me? Yeah, can someone tell me what it is exactly Renjun can do?”

All eyes in the room turn to look at him, and Chenle is gapes in disbelief. “You don’t know?”

“Nope? Sue me, everyone starts talking in riddles when it comes to that guy.”

“He has the power of compulsion,” Jaemin says from his chair, kneading his forehead with his fingers. “He can compel you to do something by making eye contact and telling you to do it.”

“Ohh,” he sighs, a dozen different realisations running through his mind at once. “This makes so much more sense now!”

“So the mind controller has been mind controlled by SM?” Yangyang looks around, wide-eyed. “He could do anything, then.”

“Renjun never liked to call it that,” Jeno explains gently. “It’s not technically the right term, anyway. You’re partially cognisant when he asks you to do something. More like body control rather than mind.”

“And to answer your question,” Jaemin says, looking up at Jungwoo, “It doesn’t mean we’re beaten. We can get them out. We have to get them out, no matter the risk.”

“I agree,” Sungchan says, arms crossed. “They’ve probably been preparing them for combat in case SM found the hideout, not the other way around. We have the upper hand because they don’t know we’re coming. They won’t be prepared, they won’t have them ready to fight, and the others won’t want to fight us. We can go in and get them out quickly and quietly.”

“You’re right,” Taeyong says from where he’s still crouching at Jaemin’s side. “We have the advantage of surprise, and we’d be foolish not to use it.”

“This won’t be like before,” Doyoung reminds him. “We knew the building, we knew their schedule. This time we’ll almost certainly have to get past the guards and their awful taser weapons.”

“Some of us can protect ourselves against things like that,” Yuta says, face set.

“Or run past them,” Jungwoo says.

“Or explode them,” Donghyuck grins. “We can take them on.”

“We’ll regret it if we don’t try,” Mark says, with a certainty that makes Hendery shiver.

Taeyong looks around the room, meets each face looking back at him. “Shall we take a vote on this, then? Those in favour of going into SM and getting our friends out, even if it means fighting them, raise your hands.”

Everyone raises their hand at once. Taeyong half-smiles, looking utterly exhausted and completely unsurprised.

“Alright. Then we will save our friends. But not tonight.”

“What? But this is the perfect chance!” Chenle argues. “Jaemin has seen them, he knows they’re okay—”

“I only spoke to three of them. For all we know, the others could have been under SM’s magic mind-numbing spell instead of sleeping.”

“We’re certainly not going in without a plan, or without proper sleep. It’s not a good idea to do anything impulsively. We’ll sleep now, prepare tomorrow.”

“How am I supposed to sleep knowing all of this?” Donghyuck mutters.

“You’ve exploded plenty of things today, Hyuck, I’m sure you’ll sleep fine,” Yuta says, standing up straight to help Jaemin onto his feet. “I’ll take first watch.”

“It’s alright, I’ll do it,” Hendery says, rolling his shoulders. “I want to do some scans of the area the others visited, anyway.”

“I’ll do it with you, then,” Chenle says. “Since that means you’ll be looking at your computer more than actually watching out for anything.”

Taeyong eyes the two of them, then nods. “Okay. Wake me up in a few hours, alright? Don’t stay up the whole night again.” He points at Hendery specifically. “I mean that.”

“Yes, Dad,” Chenle says, accepting Kun’s gentle pat to the head. “We’ll be fine.”

The hub is a great room to do watch from, but not one they often use, as Hendery is usually busy doing work in there. Being the hideout’s unofficial head of security means he’s offered peace and quiet to do work when he needs it. Technically, they should have two watchmen on guard at all times, one at either side of the building—but after having only three visitors in the span of a year, two of which didn’t even make it to the front door, they got lax about that sort of thing. The third visitor was him, of course, and he’d been lucky to make it past Jaemin’s defences at all—but now that he’s here, he’s able to keep a good eye on the area for them from the comfort of his monitors.

He diverts into the kitchen as everyone else takes turns washing up for bed, popping some bread into the toaster and hopping up to sit on the counter. His mind is running far ahead of him with the possibilities opened up over the last twenty-four hours. So everyone here wants to go and rescue their friends, the superpowered young adult captives, from the evil corporate entity of SM. They’re up against people with some of the most powerful abilities in the world, potentially under the influence of evil mind-control to boot, and they need to scrape together a plan of action and implement it within the next twenty-four hours. Wonderful. He can work with this.

In truth, this might be the most dangerous and exciting thing to happen in his life. After so many months of laying low, of scanning far and wide for people like them and for any movement from SM, Sungchan has brought them all this opportunity. All of this risk. As much as he knows there could be lives in the balance here, he can’t help but feel so invigorated, so excited by the possibility of what they could achieve. This will be game-changing for them, no matter the outcome.

Chenle is already sitting in the dark hub room when arrives, toast in hand. He’s sitting against the wall of windows on the far side of the room, forehead pressed against the glass, staring out into the distance. He doesn’t move when Hendery comes in and shuts the door behind him, leaving them with only the sounds of his whirring computer for company in the dark room.

The first thing he does is pull the sheet from the whiteboard at the front of the classroom, revealing the mind map he usually keeps to himself, full of complicated scribblings Donghyuck would probably declare mad scientist work. It’s crammed with notes and ideas, but in the centre are six pictures: Johnny, Taeil, Renjun, Lucas, Jaehyun and Sicheng, along with notes about their powers. Before doing anything else, he clears out some of the notes under Renjun to fill things in more accurately.

By the time he’s jotted down a spiel about mind control potentially changing fighting capabilities, Chenle has his head up, paying closer attention. “What is all this?”

“A plan,” he says, clearing space next to the images for two more. “A rescue operation is what everyone here has been working towards for so long. Have to collect information where I can, help prepare us all.”

Chenle leaves his post by the window to come over to the board, clicking the lamp on for a better look. “You’ve been working on all this?”

“Of course,” he says, sitting down in his chair and wheeling over to the desk. “What do you think I do in here all day?”

He stretches out a hand to touch the body of his computer, and the hum of the CPU rings through him, live and thrumming and linking smoothly with his mind and body. He pulls up a picture of Jisung in just a few seconds, sets it to print, and starts the hunt for Shotaro’s digital presence. “Jaemin didn’t say a surname for the Japanese recruit, did he?”

“No,” Chenle says, voice small.

He turns to glance at him, only to find Chenle staring at the image of Jisung appearing in the printing tray. Hendery turns back to the screen, going through a whole list of Shotaros—many who haven’t been active online in a few months, but none reported missing. Only so many in South Korea, but hard to narrow down as it is—he reaches out for any information around them that might be strange, any reports in their areas of unusual events. He wishes he could pick Jaemin’s brains a bit more about what he saw, but the poor guy had been wiped by the trip, and Doyoung might bite his head off for asking about it so late. He’ll ask in the morning.

“It’s been nearly two years since I last saw him,” Chenle says, and Hendery turns to see him carefully sticking Jisung’s picture up in the empty space. “He looks taller. Probably bigger than me, now.”

“You know, all this time that you’ve talked about Jisung, I never realised he was Jaemin’s brother.”

Chenle turns to him, pulling a face. “Did you think Jaemin was talking about a different Jisung?”

“I just thought the three of you and Jeno were all friends before SM,” he says, sending a stock placeholder for Shotaro to print. “I didn’t realise they were related.”

“That’s funny, because I only knew Jaemin as Jisung’s older brother before we went into SM. Our families are old friends, but I mostly hung out with Jisung, and I met Jeno for the first time in the labs. We grew a lot closer under their roof, though—I think Jaemin was trying to look out for me, because neither of us could see Jisung anymore.”

“I’m sorry that you haven’t been able to see him in so long” he says, bringing Shotaro’s blank image to stick up beside Jisung’s. “It must have been hard for you and Jaemin.”

“It really sucks,” he says, stepping back and watching Hendery start to write in their spaces. “He’ll be eighteen, now. Even if we manage to save him and get him here, and even if we can live here safely afterwards, it’s still two years that we’ve missed out on together. Our craziest teen years. We’re probably both really different people, now.”

“You’ll still be best friends,” he reassures him, writing under Shotaro _ability: ??? space thing._ “If your bond is strong, you’ll click back into place, no problem.”

Chenle is silent for a few moments. “Even if we are like that…. and even if he isn’t afraid of us, or ashamed of his powers, or betrayed that we’ve been gone for so long… even if we can be as close as we were before, we’ll never be the same. We can’t go to the movies. We can’t go to school together. We’ll be stuck living in this crumbling building until SM find us, or Taeyong figures out how to get all twenty-three of us out of the country. We can’t be normal kids anymore. Isn’t that messed up? Just because something mutated in our DNA, they want to round us up and treat us like rabid animals?”

He steps back from the board to look at Chenle properly. “It is. It’s inhumane. Someone like Jisung needs help, not to be caged up.”

“I know Jisung has a very different ability to me. I understand the danger—it was hard for all of us to control what we had at first. But he’s still a human being. Not an experiment. None of us are.” His voice wobbles dangerously at the end of the sentence, and he crosses his arms in front of his chest. Hendery feels his stomach dip. He’s not sure he could handle a crying Chenle.

“Hey,” he says, coming up to him and putting a hand on his shoulder. “That’s why we’re getting them out. They won’t be in there much longer. You can get him out yourself, right?”

Chenle nods furiously, wiping his eyes with his sleeve. “Yes. I will. No one can stop me.”

“That’s the spirit,” he smiles, capping his whiteboard pen. “We’ll get them all out.”

Chenle sniffs a few times, eyes skimming over the board as Hendery goes back to his computer, pulling up a satellite view of the detention centre to scan for any strange activity.

“Why do you care so much?” Chenle asks after a few minutes. He’s circled back to sit against the windows again, facing Hendery this time. “You were never in there. You don’t know any of them. We’re putting everything at risk to get them out—if SM get a hold of Taeyong during this, it’s over for all of us. I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t want to help us risk it all.”

“You’re right. I don’t know them,” he says, clicking through the images. Nothing seems off. He starts to sift through social media for any posts, any sightings, any media mention of their names. “But I’m like them. And I know you guys, and you’re all like my family, now. If our family needs help, then I should help them. Plus, it’s pretty exciting. Things were starting to get boring around here.”

“That’s how I can tell you’ve never been to SM,” Chenle says. “I want to get them out, but I’m not excited to go back there. I hate it so much.”

Hendery hums. “You ever regret coming to Korea? Ending up here?”

Chenle shakes his head. “No. I’ve spent half my life here, moving back and forth between Seoul and Shanghai. I like both places, but I never had a friend like Jisung in Shanghai. I loved being here so I could see him.”

“That’s sweet. You should say that to him, when we get him out.”

“Nah. We’re not sappy like that. I’ll probably just hit him and tell him not to scare me again.”

“Everyone likes to be told they’re loved.”

“That is how I tell him. If he whines at me, that’s how I know he loves me back.”

He smiles. “You guys really are close.”

“What about you? Do you regret coming to Korea?”

“Yes,” he sighs. “And no. I came here as a student, to be in a new culture and improve my Korean. I loved my school, and I always loved the people here. But it meant that I was so afraid of my power was it was first developing. If I had still been in Macau, no one would’ve been hunting me down. No one would have known. But SM was scouring every inch of Korea for strange activity over here.”

“Do you ever wonder if there are more people like us out there, in China? So many of us in the hideout are Chinese. I wonder about that a lot.”

“That’s the thing. I’ve been looking around, keeping an eye everything that develops, every theory on the internet. All the genuine cases of mutations appear in Korea, even though half of us aren’t actually Korean. It’s so strange.”

“And Jeno, Jisung, Jaemin and I already knew each other before our powers developed, and so did Taeil and Taeyong. Out of twenty-three cases, what are the chances that we would already know each other? And all of us are boys, and now we know that two sets of brothers have abilities, too. Why? What’s causing all this? It drives me crazy to think about.”

“Yangyang has no ability, so it might not have passed through genes.” He shrugs. “Unless he has something that hasn’t manifested yet. For all I can search the internet, I still can’t understand why we have these powers. Maybe if I join the rescue mission, I’ll be able to scan SM’s databases for answers.”

“Taeyong won’t want to take you with them unless you’re essential to the mission. There are so many people to bring home already, and he can only teleport two at a time.”

“I know. And I’m not a fighter. But I might still be needed.” He withdraws a hand from the CPU and runs it through his hair, and it crackles with static. “I’m brainstorming a few things, though. They might need me for other reasons. We’ll see what they think of my ideas tomorrow.”

There’s a lull between them as he searches a few more avenues, police systems and army logs and business emails sent from the surrounding area. All seems okay online, but he knows how limited his own ability is. He can only hope the silence is a good sign.

Chenle keeps shifting in his seat. He doesn’t usually take watch for this very reason: he’s incapable of staying still. “All good at SM?”

“I don’t think they noticed the scouting party. We’re good to go.”

Chenle nods at him. “Thank you for all you’ve done for us. You’re the only person who’s chosen to come to the hideout, you know. And you’ve helped us so much since you arrived.”

He smiles. “It’s no problem, Lele. We’re only going to get through this crazy existence if we work together. I knew that from the moment my power first started going haywire and I couldn’t stop viewing memes in my mind at lightspeed.”

Chenle groans. “Your power sounds so fun. When mine was first developing, I almost accidentally beheaded Jisung by throwing a frisbee at him.”

He laughs, too loud for the late hour. “That’s way more exciting. It’s not so fun when you can’t figure out how to stop playing different versions of Nyan cat on a loop on every screen you touch.”

“You were a student,” Chenle points out. “That sounds way more passable for normality than most of the powers here.”

“Yeah, maybe,” he grins. “But I was already interested in technology and coding before my ability developed. What I can do now is leagues beyond what any hacker could learn to do for themselves. It scares me, sometimes. I feel like I should be doing more with it, but I don’t know what.”

“Maybe you will, one day. Maybe we’ll all move abroad and set up an underground superhero team and make more out of our powers. You can expose American politicians while I fight thugs in alleyways.”

“You’re so much cooler than me, Chenle,” he bemoans. “What am I, your trusty sidekick?”

“Yes. You’re my guy in the chair, and one day we’ll be able to take down the government together. Just you wait and see!”

“If we can pull this rescue mission off, let’s make it a plan.”

“We’re going to pull it off,” Chenle says, firm. “There’s no other option. We can’t go back there.”

“Then we will,” he agrees. “I’ll start on the superhero outfits right away, in that case.”

“Good,” Chenle says, looking back out of the windows with a smile on his face.

-

“Here’s the thing,” Taeyong is saying, stood at the front of the sports hall. Everyone is there, stood in a loose circle, some still finishing their breakfast. No one looks well rested. “We need to be prepared. Now we know that brainwashing is in the game, we don’t know the extent we might have to fight our friends. If we try to bring them back here, they could resist us. Even if SM isn’t prepared for us and we can avoid that route, we still need to be prepared for anything and everything they could hit us with.”

“We also need a plan for bringing them out of any influence they might be under. We can’t bring them back here with SM in their heads,” Ten says, arm around a sleepy Yangyang on the bench. “It’s no good if we save them only for Jisung to turn the hideout into ash, or something. Then we’re all fucked.”

“Agreed,” Kun says. “But if we know nothing about the extent of this control, how can we begin to know if they’re free of it? Or how to go about freeing them?”

Jaemin shifts his feet. “We don’t necessarily need to bring them out of it. We just need to subdue them. If we’re paired up against them well, we’ll be able to bring them here and wait for it to wear off. When I spoke to Renjun and Johnny, they seemed coherent. They knew me, and they knew themselves. This control SM has cooked up can’t last forever, especially if it’s drug-based.”

Taeyong nods, expression measured. “Jeno, do you think you could help us make some restraints for them?”

“Basic ones? I could do some handcuffs, no problem, but it’s harder to make something that could hold Johnny or Jaehyun.”

“That’s good enough. We’ll deal with those two when we get to them.”

“Don’t you think those are the two we should be thinking about first? They’re the biggest threat,” Doyoung says. “If they’re ordered to kill us, they could do it easily. Taeil and Lucas, too.”

“Don’t forget Jisung,” Jaemin says wearily. “Taeyong is right. We have to know who we’re fighting, and how to make sure their abilities can do the least damage possible.”

“Even if it comes to fighting them, they wouldn’t kill us,” Chenle says. “The one thing SM cares about above everything else is having us, keeping us, and using us. My bet is that the others will be under orders to capture everyone they can. Apart from Taeyong. They probably want to kill Taeyong to cut off our movement.”

“Nice,” Taeyong says. “Thanks, Chenle.”

“Renjun’s ability is perfect for those sorts of orders,” Donghyuck says, grim. “He’s the one we need to worry about.”

“I don’t think so. He’s not as powerful as you all seem to think,” Jaemin says. “Renjun’s ability relies on you hearing him and meeting his eyes. Those are some serious restrictions on the scope of his power. He can’t walk into a room and make everyone start tap dancing. He’s in the habit of looking to the side of people’s faces when he talks to them anyway, so if you can do the same thing when you see him, his ability won’t reach you at all. Then he’s just a normal person.”

“We could get some auditory protection against that, too,” Hendery suggests, hand half in the air. “I can rig up something to play loud music when he’s close by.”

“That’s not very practical for a stealth mission,” Sungchan points out.

“It won’t be a stealth mission if it comes to the point of defending ourselves from them. If you bring me along, I can make sure it’s only helping, not hindering.”

“You want to come?” Yuta asks. “I think we’re going to have a big party as it is, if we’re taking everyone here with an offensive power. And me.”

“Yes. Nine of us, if you include me. That’s four trips in for Taeyong.”

“And eight out,” Jungwoo says. “It’ll take too long if we have to get out of there fast.”

“It’s an even number of people when you minus Taeyong himself. He’d be doing the same number of jumps even without me there,” he points out.

“Yes, but I thought we might take Doyoung or Mark in that eighth space. Their abilities might come in handy.”

“If you want to get through that building without immediately setting off alarms, I’m your guy,” he says, only mildly offended. “Mark struggles under pressure, and going under nightfall lessens the need for Doyoung’s ability.”

“He’s not wrong,” Mark says.

“Alright,” Taeyong agrees. “So it’s a mission of nine, if Hendery is coming as support. We’re definitely going to attract some attention.”

“We can take down the guards, no problem,” Chenle says, arms crossed. “Send in our hard hitters first, Jungwoo and Sungchan, Yuta too if you want some defence. Make our way through the building as a group, and Ten will be able to find the others. Then we bring them home as quickly as we can. Did you get any sense of where exactly they were being kept, Jaemin?”

“The bedrooms seem to be on the upper left side of the building, but Jisung was sleeping in the basement. I’m guessing they don’t have proper preventatives for his power, yet.”

“Okay. So we divert two or three people off to get Jisung, and everyone else goes to the bedrooms. We regroup there, and Taeyong brings us back to the hideout as soon as we’re sure everyone’s of their right mind. Straightforward enough?”

“You say it like it’s going to be easy,” Dejun says, scratching his head. “It won’t be that simple.”

“No,” Chenle agrees. “We’re still going into a lot of unknowns. We’ll have to adjust when we get there, but everyone here is smart, and most of us have been training for a long time. We’re more than capable.”

Donghyuck slings an arm around Chenle’s shoulders. “You’re too good for us, kiddo.”

“It’s the truth,” Chenle insists. “I know we can do this.”

“I know,” Donghyuck responds, squeezing him into a side hug. “I mean it.”

“What about the home team?” Yangyang asks. “You’re leaving six of us hanging around here. What can we do?”

“Sit tight and get ready to handle eight traumatised recruits,” Taeyong says. “Someone might need to take stock of our inventory, so we know what we already have and what we’ll need to get for them.”

“Excuse me if that feels a bit demeaning,” Doyoung remarks, crossing his arms. “I’m not counting our eggs while you guys get ready for war.”

“There may be no war,” Taeyong remarks, eyebrows raised in challenge. “We might get lucky.”

“There will be blood,” Mark says, out of nowhere. He’s sitting on the floor and staring into the middle distance, fiddling with his hands.

The hall around him is deadly silent for a beat, and Hendery can feel his heart skip in his chest. “Ours?”

Mark looks at him absently, nibbling on a hangnail. “Dunno.”

“Great,” Donghyuck says, leaving Chenle’s side to tug his hand away from his mouth. “Any other uplifting words of wisdom for us, oh oracle?”

“Uh,” Mark says, snapping out of his daze as Donghyuck pulls him to his feet. “Good luck, everyone?”

Chenle sighs, loudly. “Everyone can ignore him. Shall we give ourselves some jobs to do until it gets dark?”

“Great idea, Chenle,” Taeyong says, turning away from Mark (“Hey, don’t tell them to ignore me!”). “Jeno, Jaemin, Mark, can you work on the restraints and other tools we’ll need? Yuta, Chenle, Ten, it would be great if you could outline a tactical plan. Everyone else… practise your abilities, or prepare yourselves however you need. Hendery, what were you thinking about this sound defence idea?”

“Oh, yeah.” He shakes himself, focusing in on Taeyong’s face. “You ever been to an Apple store?”

“Yes? I think so. Why?”

“You fancy taking their AirPods?”

“Let’s just buy them, if we can,” Taeyong says, and Hendery raises his eyebrows.

“You’ve been out of the world for too long, Hyung. Those things are a small fortune, and we need nine pairs.”

Taeyong sighs, tilting his head back to stare at the ceiling. He doesn’t like turning to crime if they don’t have to, but this is a special case, and he knows he’ll give in quickly.

“Fine,” he says. “But we’re putting them back once we’re done.”

“Sure,” he grins. “Hyung, you going to help us?”

Doyoung is already looking their way, unimpressed. “I’m pretty sure our crime rate went up since you joined the hideout, you know.”

“What would you do without me?”

“A lot less shifty activity, is what we’d do.”

“If we’re done with the group meeting, can you guys move this upstairs? Some of us want to spar in here,” Donghyuck says, standing up from the bench. “Sungchan, let’s run you through some of our usual drills.”

“Anyone have anything left that needs to be said?” Taeyong asks the room, but no one speaks up. “Alright. We’ll meet again this afternoon. Until then, do what you have to.”

They split off into their respective rooms of choice, many of them staying in the sports hall. Hendery gravitates back to the hub with Taeyong and Doyoung in tow, talking tactics, Yangyang and Jungwoo right behind them as Hendery brings up footage of the mall Taeyong is talking about. Seems adequate enough.

“We need to move as little as possible if we have an illusion over us,” Doyoung explains. “Especially if we’re moving through crowds, in broad daylight. It’s nearly impossible for me to keep up a solid image with so many different factors around us.”

“If you can land us outside the mall, Taeyong, the Apple store is just beside the Western exit. It’s still early in the morning, so it won’t be too busy if we go now.”

Taeyong peers over at the area Hendery is pointing to on the screen. “I can get us there. I used to go to this mall all the time as a kid. I just need to know Doyoung is confident enough to protect us.”

“Even if it’s not a perfect mirage, it’s enough if you’re mostly hidden,” Jungwoo says. “As long as you’re not going around standing next to your own wanted posters, no one is going to suspect that the crazy superpowered on-the-run kids are infiltrating an Apple store.”

“But we need to cause as little trouble as possible today if we’re going to be breaking into SM later tonight,” Taeyong says. “So can you do this, Doyoung?”

Doyoung sighs, long-suffering. “Yes. Just put us in a corner when we get there, and I’ll manage the rest.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” Hendery says, patting Doyoung’s arm heartily. “Are we going now?”

“Urgh, I hate this,” Doyoung groans, but he holds his hand out for Taeyong to take anyway.

“Good luck,” Yangyang says, eyes bright. “Bring me back a pair, yeah?”

“In your dreams,” he laughs, before Taeyong squeezes his hand, and he finds himself nose to a wall inside Yeongdeungpo mall. A quick look around confirms his prediction—the mall has visitors, but is by no means busy, and no one had been looking to see three boys mysteriously appearing at the corner entrance.

“They can’t see us,” Doyoung confirms, his free hand twitching by his side. “Or hear us, but try and keep it down. There’s only so much I can do.”

It’s weird to be out in the world again. Good, though. He forgets people still have normal lives in the outside world, sometimes. There are two bored attendees and one middle-aged customer in the Apple store, so it’s easy enough for them to move around the store without a fault, linked in a chain of hands and quietly stepping between the tables to reach the storeroom. The hurdle he didn’t anticipate was the wait for someone to come by and unlock it. He can feel Taeyong getting antsy behind him as they’re forced to listen to the attendee complain about their slacking co-worker, with the barely interested female attendee humming in answer. No one is in the store, and it looks like they won’t be needing anything from the storeroom for a while.

The longer they’re away from the hideout, the more dangerous it is, and he knows they need to get in there sooner rather than later. He could reach up and get through their fancy code lock with the touch of a hand. It would be so easy—it’s the door opening by itself that would be less easy to explain away.

“Hey,” he whispers, twisting around to speak to Doyoung. “Do you think you could make us a distraction?”

Doyoung is sweating slightly, either from nerves or the exertion of his ability. “Like what?”

“Make a noise outside the store,” Taeyong suggests. “Something to draw their attention away.”

“We only need a second,” he promises, and Doyoung looks to the heavens, still clutching Taeyong’s hand.

“I’ll count you down,” he whispers, and Hendery nods. Doyoung turns his attention to the main floor of the mall. “Three, two, one…”

He puts a hand to the keypad, and it makes a chiming noise right as the two attendees jump to their feet, looking out at the mall walkway. He freezes, whipping around to see if they’d noticed the real noise, but the female attendee is already running out to look for whatever Doyoung had made her hear.

“Go, go!” Taeyong whispers, shoving him through the storeroom door. Unfortunately, the male attendee seems to hear him—just as Doyoung is making his way through the door, Hendery sees the attendee turn to look over at the storeroom, right before the door clicks shut.

“Shit!” he says, running through the room towards the AirPod boxes. “We have to grab them and go!”

“Jisoo, was that you?” the guy calls, the sound of his footsteps approaching the door echoing through the room.

“Forget it, Hendery!” Doyoung says, but Hendery, attuned to exactly what he needs, is already swiping boxes of AirPods from the shelves and gripping them in his arms.

“Hold tight!” Taeyong orders, grabbing his free hand right as they hear the opening chime of the stockroom door ring out again.

Then they’re back in the hub, boxes spilling from his arms, adrenaline hot in his blood. “Yes!” he exclaims, watching one roll to a stop at Yangyang’s feet. He can tell at a glance that he has more than enough to cover their needs. “We did it!”

“Oh my God,” Doyoung says, sinking down to the floor with a hand over his heart. “We’re never doing that again.”

“It was fine,” he says, like his heart isn’t jackhammering too. “Well done, team.”

Taeyong sinks into his seat by the desk, resting his head in his arms. “Yes, well done. I just need a moment to recover, I think.”

“You’ve rescued eleven people from captivity of the evil Korean government, and you’re still scared of an Apple store employee?”

Yangyang watches them with a beaming grin. “Sounds like you guys had fun!”

“You’re all going to give me a heart attack one of these days,” Doyoung says, standing up and wobbling over to the hub door. “I wouldn’t blame you if you leave Hendery at SM tonight, Taeyong.”

“Ha, ha,” he says, already focused on gathering up his AirPods. “You want to help me, Yangie? Now I just need to link all these up to something that plays music and load up some bangers for the mission.”

“You kids have fun,” Taeyong says, and Jungwoo puts an arm around his shoulders as he stands. “I’ll see you at dinner.”

When the door shuts behind them, Yangyang starts giggling quietly, methodically opening the boxes between them. “I’m so glad you’re here, you know. They’d be way more boring without you.”

“Don’t you know it,” he says, winking at him playfully. “What am I here for if not to boost morale and increase general risk-taking?”

“For finding others who need help, and managing our security, and finding SM’s new base,” Yangyang says, throwing a box over his shoulder as he counts off Hendery’s merits on his fingers. “You basically run this place. How did they survive without you?”

“Thank you! That’s what I’m saying! Leave me at SM, my ass,” he says, as the door behind them swings open again.

“Who’s ass?” Dejun asks, and Hendery wiggles his butt at him from the desk.

“This cargo right here, baby,” he says, and Dejun grimaces at him, slapping his butt playfully as he passes.

“Stop that.”

“You left and came back already?” Kun says from the door, coming in after Dejun. “I swear, we’re getting laxer about making trips out as time goes on. I thought they would at least check in with us before going.”

“The last two days have been an exception,” Yangyang points out. “Usually Taeyong wouldn’t do anything without thinking about it for at least two days first.”

“He’s only going to be more careful once our numbers go up and SM have no one left,” Dejun says, leaning against Yangyang without moving to help him with the boxes at all. “But sitting on our asses won’t help us get anything done right now.”

“Oh, yay, ass talk again,” Hendery says, wiggling his butt. Kun comes up to mimic choking him, but he’s laughing at him as he does.

“I’m glad you’re back safe, is what I came to say,” Kun says, relaxing his arms and looking at Hendery’s carefully placed line of AirPods. “You’re doing really well. I know the others appreciate your work.”

The door goes again. “You spilling state secrets about the older members again, Kun? Doyoung will have your head,” Ten tuts, crossing his arms over his chest and moving into the room to stand with them.

“What is this, an intervention?” he asks, looking around at the gathering crowd in his usually quiet hub room. “Are we having a party in the hub on the potential last day of our lives?”

“I sensed a Chinese gathering was happening,” Ten says, putting two fingers to the sides of his forehead and screwing up his eyes. “Chenle will be here any minute now.”

“You’re barely Chinese,” Kun says, nudging him, and Ten shoots him an unimpressed look.

“We actually came to check on you,” Dejun explains. “Yuta raised a good point just now. Of everyone going to SM tomorrow, you’re the only one who has no combat training.”

“Alright,” he says, clutching his chest over his heart. “Hit where it hurts, why don’t you?”

“Where does Yuta have training from?” Yangyang asks.

“He’s a black belt in taekwondo,” Ten tells him. “And he’s been learning from those of us who used to be in SM ever since he arrived in the hideout. You’ve never so much as stepped into a sparring session.”

“What am I supposed to do? Read out your old tweets until you die of embarrassment?”

“That’s just the problem,” Dejun says, gently. “If it comes down to it, Taeyong might have to get you out of there early. You have to promise not to argue, not to do anything stupid. Stay away from fights, and stick by Yuta or one of the others who can protect you.”

“I know,” he says, meeting his eyes, finally serious. “I know what’s at stake here. I’m not going to act stupid for the sake of it.”

“And you’ll focus on the mission?” Chenle says, and Hendery swivels, wondering how he opened the door without anyone hearing (“Jesus, do you move like a cat too?”). “You were talking yesterday about getting into their databases, but we can’t afford any distraction, any detours. The rescue is our only priority.”

“Oh, that. I was just spitballing, I wasn’t serious. I promise I’ll stick with the others and look out for your friends. Is the intervention over, now?”

“Hendery,” Dejun says, imploring. “Please, just—be careful. Don’t be ashamed to ask us if you need something.”

“When have I ever been ashamed of anything?” he says, sending him a smile, but he knows Dejun won’t be able to unwind until the mission is over. He’s too like Doyoung in that way—too anxious about what could go wrong, rather than excited for what could go right.

“Your pride can occasionally get in the way,” Yangyang says, cheekily. “Other than that, you have no problem saying exactly what you need.”

Hendery points at him. “You’re exactly right there. Have no fear—I’ll be on my best behaviour in the funhouse.”

“You’re lucky you get to go, really,” Yangyang says, resting against one of the monitors. Hendery bats him away, and he swings back to lean against Dejun instead. “The others never let me go anywhere.”

“That’s a lie,” Ten snorts. “You’re almost always the one going on supply runs.”

“Yeah, but picking up trash from scrapyards isn’t the same thing as a rescue mission,” he laments. “It sounds so cool.”

“God, I’m so glad you’re not going,” Kun says, sounding pained.

“Yeah, you’re still a baby,” Ten remarks with a Cheshire grin. “SM would eat you up for breakfast.”

“Not if you ate them up first,” Yangyang says, leaning over the monitor again to come closer to Ten. Hendery sighs.

“Who says I wouldn’t eat you up, too?” Ten asks, and Kun throws his hands in the air, turning around to head for the door.

“Wait until I’m gone! I’m going!” he announces, yanking the door open. “No eating anyone, please!”

Yangyang laughs, loud and bright, and Ten doesn’t even look ruffled.

“We’re talking tactics in the hall after lunch,” Chenle says. “If you’re coming on the mission, make sure you’re there, okay?”

“Sir, yes sir!” he says, giving Chenle a salute. “You in charge?”

“Obviously,” Chenle says. “Sometimes I think I’m the only one around here with brains.”

“You’re definitely the man for the job,” he says, winking at him as he leaves the room, too.

“Do you need any more help with these?” Yangyang asks, leaning heavily against the monitor as he gestures at the AirPods. Ten is nuzzling at his neck, like he would if he were a cat, but he’s still standing there in human form and Hendery is disturbed.

“I’m fine, thanks,” he says, gesturing to the door. “Can you get your weird bonding thing done somewhere else?”

“It’s called having feelings,” Ten quips, taking Yangyang’s hand and pulling him to the door. “You should try it sometime.”

“Oh, I have plenty of feelings about you, Lee Ten,” he remarks, raising his voice as they walk away. “First one: you’re not as hot as you think you are! Second one—”

“Bye!” Ten calls, slamming the door a little harder than necessary behind him.

Then it’s just Dejun and him left in the hub, the line of AirPods sitting between them. “You sure you don’t need any help?” he asks, significantly quieter and more bearable than all the others.

“You could help me pick some good battle songs,” he says, moving so that Dejun has space to sit at his desktop. “Loud music that doesn’t lull anywhere, something I can blast as soon as Huang Renjun is in a three-mile radius of us.”

Dejun sucks in a breath through his teeth, doubtful. “Well, I can try. That’s not usually my genre.”

“Unless you’d rather be helping them run Sungchan through those drills?”

“No, no, I think I can manage here,” he says. “Donghyuck is scary when he’s in charge.”

Hendery finds himself smiling without trying, for once. “That’s what I thought.”

-

After a long day of endless discussion—he really does his best not to tune out when it starts getting repetitive—they’re finally ready to go, suited up and standing close together in the sports hall. Hendery passes out the AirPods to everyone but Ten, who cites some sort of bullshit animal privilege about Renjun’s influence, something he really could’ve mentioned before Hendery spent the time painstakingly balancing nine signals to one device. Whatever. They’re also armed with several pairs of handcuffs and even a bulletproof vest for Hendery, courtesy of Jeno, who’d spent the day extending himself as much as Jaemin would let him. The poor guy looks about ready to pass out, still recovering from his bout of flu, but Hendery feels a lot more secure with the vest than without. It could save his life, for all he knows.

For all his bravado, he’s feeling afraid, now. It’s starting to become real, watching Chenle hug Jaemin long and hard before slotting four different kinds of knives into his belt, Jungwoo wringing out his hands with nerves as Doyoung pats his shoulder. They’re about to infiltrate SM to break out eight young adults from a government secure facility. Oh, and possibly fight them while they’re at it. Super strength that could snap him in half, energy manipulation that could leave him half-dead with one touch, a boy who can crumble shit with his hands….

Yeah. This is fine. They’ll be fine.

Taeyong is strapping his mangled leg up securely, patting it and standing to test the wrappings. This must be so much worse for Taeyong, who’s done this twice already, who lost so much trying to save his friends before. They’ll do it right this time. They have to.

“Is everyone ready?” he asks, striding over to the loose huddle they’re waiting in. “Stupid question, I know. I’m antsy too.”

“As ready as we’ll ever be, I think,” Yuta says. “We should go sooner rather than later.”

“I agree,” Taeyong says, rolling his shoulders. “Right. Anything left to say before we go?”

Mark shuffles from one foot to the other opposite him, and Donghyuck looks his way. “Mark? Please don’t say the blood thing again.”

“No, I’m not,” he splutters, cheeks dusting pink. “I just—wanted to wish you guys good luck. And I think that this is going to be worth it. So, uh, just… remember that.”

“That sounds loads better than before!” Yangyang says, clapping him on the back. “Good job, man!”

“Thanks,” Mark mutters, scratching the back of his head.

“And with those words,” Taeyong says, holding his hands out to Jungwoo and Sungchan. “Shall we depart?”

Sungchan takes his hand without hesitation, though his face is pale. “Let’s go.”

Jungwoo tilts his head, breathing in through his teeth. He sighs, and takes Taeyong’s other hand. “See you soon, everyone.”

Then the three of them are gone, and there’s a collective inhale in the room. No one moves for a few moments, and then Taeyong is back, standing between Yuta and Donghyuck. In the next instant, that trio disappears, too.

This is a good sign. They’re in successfully. This is happening. At his side, Dejun squeezes his arm gently, and Hendery sends him a nod.

Taeyong returns, picking up Chenle and Ten in one swift move. Hendery braces himself, making eye contact with Yangyang as the air shifts beside him, and Taeyong appears between himself and Dejun.

Yangyang’s encouraging smile is the last thing he sees. He panics for a few seconds, because the room they land in is dark and silent, and he briefly wonders if Taeyong has teleported them to a nowhere-place. Then Taeyong shifts beside him, arm brushing against his—and over to his left, something else moves, a soft light glowing over part of the room. Donghyuck holds a suspended explosion between two hands, a continually burning fire, casting enough light to show the abandoned tables and the other guys standing around him. The visitation room was never converted into anything, it seems.

“Ten? What do you hear?” Taeyong’s voice asks, a whisper in the motionless room. Beside the door, he can see a shadowed form of a great tiger padding across the floor, ears twitching.

Hendery, personally, can’t hear anyone. It’s like they’re in an abandoned building. No walking in the hallways, no doors shutting in the distance, nothing. Ten shifts back to his lean human form and tells them as much.

“Nothing. I’ll be able to tell you more if we get through this door and start moving,” he says, eyes sharp. “We might just be in a disused part of the building.”

“It’s not completely disused,” Hendery says. He can hear the singing of the technology built into the door, keeping it locked, can sense the just-beyond-reach ring of the alarms ready to spring. This room is only used to keep the other boys trapped inside. “But there’s definitely more active technology further into the building.”

“You want to get us out of here?” Taeyong prompts, and Hendery quietly treads toward the door.

He puts a hand to the wall, feeling for the stretch of wire buried inside, the relatively simple lock system he can undo. The door clicks open in a second, and Ten steps up to the doorway, transforming down to his tiger form again.

Yuta comes up beside him, and the two lead the way through the doorway, his hands outstretched to throw up a shield. But no guards greet them, no alarms blare—they’re only met with more silence, more dark hallways, and three split paths. Hendery takes his position in the middle of the group, with Jungwoo to his left and Donghyuck to his right, holding his fire high for them all to see each other.

After an agonising half-minute, Ten transforms back again. “Jaemin was right. There are several people in rooms to the left. But I think there are people that way, too,” he says, pointing to the right-side hallway. “They sound like they’re pacing, or something. Training, maybe.”

“You think it’s our friends?” Taeyong asks, urgent. They hadn’t factored splitting off into three groups here, hadn’t predicted a practise session so late at night.

Ten nods. “I’m sure of it. It sounds like Johnny’s footfall, and maybe Taeil’s, too.”

“Shit,” Donghyuck mutters.

“What about the basement?” Chenle asks.

“I can’t tell, it’s too deep. Let’s assume Jisung is in there, though.”

“Okay,” Taeyong says, hand squeezed into a fist. “Sungchan, Dejun and I will go right. Yuta and Chenle will go for Jisung. You four find the others. Got it?”

“Where are we meeting?” Jungwoo asks.

“Bring them to us, if you can. If something goes wrong, just…”

“I’ll flare all the lights,” Hendery offers. “Then you should come and find us.”

“Yes, that. Remember to avoid confrontation, but don’t be afraid to knock a few heads together if you have to.”

“Roger that,” Ten says, his smile curling. “Good luck, team.”

They part without fanfare, his team splitting off from the other two groups and heading to the left. At the end of the corridor there’s another set of locked doors, and Hendery quickly gets them open, disabling several of their alarm features while he’s there. He can only hope it’s enough for the other groups to get through their doors without trouble, too. After the doors comes another corridor, and then a set of stairs at the end of it, the group toeing up them after Ten’s lead. He can’t help but think it strange that they haven’t met any guards yet, after the others were convinced there would be some at every corner—are they in the wrong part of the building after all?

No, they’re not, because at the top of the stairs are the rows of bedrooms, and they’re so heavily secured that it makes his blood fizz with static. The stifling sense of technology cramming the walls overwhelms him for a moment. They must be in here, most of them.

“They’re here,” he murmurs, putting a hand to the first locked door. “It’s them or the crown jewels of England.”

“Can you get it open?” Jungwoo asks, and he scoffs.

“Is that even a question?” This is what he knows. The code bends to his will, access scrambling away only to be caught in his net. He pulls it up and runs it through the key card slot with a gesture of his hand.

The door clicks, and Donghyuck takes the latch in both hands to pull it open—it’s thick, heavy, made of industrial-grade steel. It opens up to a pitch-black bedroom, and they’re all left standing in the doorway for a moment, tense and silent.

Then a harsh lamp light switches on, and Huang Renjun is sat up in his bed, looking at them with wide eyes. Hendery immediately diverts his gaze down to his shoulder, actively avoiding his eyeline, and his hand goes to his pocket, where the small MP3 player is ready to go.

“Donghyuck?” Renjun says, voice small. “What—you’re here?”

“Renjun,” Donghyuck asks, and Hendery can see he’s looking too far to the left, too. “Are you of sound mind right now?”

“I am, I swear,” he says, scrambling up from the bed. He’s in a worn t-shirt and loose pants, hair messed up from the pillow. “Please get me out of here.”

Ten makes a low noise in the back of his throat, almost a growl. Something feels wrong here. He risks a glance up at Renjun’s face again, who’s gazing at Donghyuck intently.

“Where are the others?” Jungwoo asks, and Renjun takes a step forward.

“Everyone’s on this floor,” Renjun says, and that’s not right, they already know that’s not true. “Where’s Taeyong?”

“Taeyong?” Donghyuck asks. “What, you have an appointment with him or something?”

That’s what’s wrong. Renjun is looking directly at Donghyuck—right at his eyes. Jaemin said he was in the habit of avoiding eye contact if he could help it.

“Donghyuck,” he says, warningly, and he can see Renjun’s gaze snap to him in his peripheral. He focuses on the back of Donghyuck’s head, too afraid to look at him directly.

“Isn’t he here? He brought you, didn’t he?” Renjun asks, and Hendery feels chills crawl up his body. Looking at Renjun feels like looking at a ghost.

“Alright,” Donghyuck says, resigned. “I’ve heard enough.”

Taking the cue, he sparks the MP3 player into life, careful to distribute the music to their three signals only. The roar of an electric guitar ramps up in his ears, so he doesn’t hear what Renjun says in response, still looking directly at Donghyuck. As Ten advances forwards, teeth bared, Renjun looks between each of them, his expression smoothing out into something stoic. Then he says something that none of them hear.

A figure bursts through the wall of Renjun’s bedroom—it’s Jaehyun, gliding right through the Renjun’s bedframe to grab his arm. Jungwoo runs forwards so fast that the the air whistles, but it’s futile—as soon as Jaehyun touches Renjun the two of them are intangible, and Jungwoo runs right through them both, skidding into the far wall as Jaehyun and Renjun phase through the opposite wall of the room and disappear.

“Hey!” Donghyuck yells, so close to Hendery that he can only just hear it over the music. “Why are you running, assholes?”

Jungwoo zooms back past them again, out of the room and back down the stairs in pursuit of wherever Jaehyun took Renjun. Ten turns to follow him, but the feel of quick, heavy footsteps thundering down the corridor makes them all turn their heads, and a huge figure races out of the shadows to latch onto Ten’s snarling tiger form. Ten leaps too, trying to shake the assault off, but it only takes them both to the floor, the figure rolling away and hitting the wall. Under the moonlight through the barred corridor windows, he sees Lucas’s face, wild-eyed with determination as he throws his arms around the tiger’s neck, snarling right back at him.

“What do we do?” he yells, taking a tentative earbud out, hovering in the doorway and watching the two tumble down the corridor. Ten’s claws are showing no mercy, but Lucas doesn’t break out a single wound, not even a scratch. A claw swiping across his face and eyes is enough to turn his head for a second—then he turns right back with a borderline maniac grin, unaffected, before grabbing Ten by his strong legs and throwing him backwards.

“I can’t get involved. I’d do more damage to Ten than Lucas,” Donghyuck says, one earbud clutched not far from his ear. “We should clear out this floor and make sure no one else is up here, and you should signal Taeyong. SM must’ve known we were coming.”

“Right,” he says, glancing up at the fluorescent lights hooked to the ceiling. He places a palm on the wall, searches around for the wiring inside, and sends an impulse up, up, to catch the mechanism. All the lights in the hallway flare bright for a few seconds, then go dark again, leaving the corridor only lit by the light of the moon.

Behind them, Ten yowls in fury. Donghyuck is already at a door further down the corridor, pressing his ear against it and trying to listen inside. “I think this is the only other locked room up here. If it’s Johnny or Jisung inside, let’s just close it again, yeah?”

“What do we really do if it is them?” he asks.

“I’m serious,” Donghyuck says, looking at him. “We’ll send Taeyong and Yuta back to get them later. We can’t take them on.”

They look at each other for a few seconds, unmoving, and Hendery is acutely aware of Lucas’s crazed laughter echoing down the hallway as Ten tries to rip him to shreds. Vaguely, he wonders who could even try to match Lucas in close combat, with a power like that.

“Okay,” he says, reaching up to bypass the security on this door, too. The mechanism is the same as before, and he’s able to sift through it quicker, get them in after only a few seconds.

Donghyuck leads the way, hands raised defensively. This room is already lit, a boy he recognises to be Sicheng sat on the end of his bed, anxiously gnawing on the skin by his thumbnail.

Opening this door feels like getting hit by a tidal wave. If he thought he was anxious before, it’s nothing quite like standing opposite Sicheng, whose ability radiates such an intense feeling of fear that he thinks he might be sick. His knees wobble slightly, and he grips the doorway to stay upright.

“Who are you?” Sicheng asks in thick Korean, standing abruptly.

“We’re friends,” Donghyuck says, and his voice shakes, too. “We’ve come to get you out of here. Can you stop doing that first, though?”

Sicheng looks between the two of them, uncomprehending. “I don’t understand.”

“You don’t have to stay here,” Hendery tries in Chinese. “We can get you to a safe place.”

Sicheng’s face changes slightly at hearing the familiar Mandarin, and he takes a tentative step forward. Then he seems to catch himself, bringing his thumb back to his mouth. “Why?”

“I’m Donghyuck,” Donghyuck says, but he doesn’t sound so sure of it himself. “Ever heard your friends mention my name? I was here before, too. We’ve come to get you all out.”

Sicheng stares at them, still radiating waves of fear, eyebrows pinched. He looks like he’s forgotten what it means to have trust.

There’s a loud thud and a crash from the hallway, and Hendery steps back to see Lucas flying towards them and rolling along the floor to just a few feet away. Jungwoo stands beside Ten, breathing heavily, then starts stalking towards Lucas. Lucas gets up and starts walking back towards him too, head on, and Hendery wonders if these are his orders—fight until you are dead, take down as many of them as you can on the way.

Jungwoo runs a circle around him immediately, grabbing him from behind and yanking him backwards. Lucas is more agile than he’d anticipated, however, and reaches out to grab Jungwoo by the arm on his descent—Jungwoo tries to pull away, but Lucas is strong, and the two go down onto their backs. As soon as he hits the floor, Lucas is up on his knees, reaching over Jungwoo to put his hands firmly around his neck.

“Hey!” Donghyuck shouts, shoving his earbud back in and running to grab Lucas around the shoulders. He heaves and pulls, trying to get him away as Jungwoo scrabbles at Lucas’s strong hands, trying to pull air into his lungs.

Hendery should go and help—Lucas is still human, he can be pushed and fought and pulled away—but he’s paralysed by fear, stood there between Sicheng and the high-powered fight in the hallway. Taeyong still hasn’t come to get them. No one has. It probably has something to do with the low rumbling coming from somewhere else in the building, the sound of stone grinding against stone as something in the foundations shifts dangerously, just too far away for them to help. The others must be in trouble too, and the mission is all going wrong so fast, and Hendery is _afraid_.

Ten comes bounding down the corridor to join the struggle, but then Jaehyun is flying through the wall in front of him and punching Ten right into one of the barred windows. Ten yowls, and Jaehyun dematerialises again right in time for Ten to jump through him.

“What’s wrong with them?” Sicheng says at his side, watching the fight with wide eyes.

“You’re not affected like that?” he asks, and Sicheng shakes his head.

“I don’t understand. Lucas!” He shouts another name too, a Chinese one, but Lucas doesn’t even look up.

“If you’re unaffected, we need to get you away from here. Taeyong can get you to safety.” He takes Sicheng by the arm, then immediately regrets it, because the wave of fear he gets from it is so strong that he staggers away. “Just—come on, follow me.”

They run down the corridor, away from the two fights, down another flight of steps. He gives his other earbud to Sicheng, because damn it, he really should’ve thought about bringing some extras. All they’d done today was talk and plan and prepare, but now that they’re here, facing danger on all sides, he feels so underprepared it’s laughable.

“Come on, it’s this way,” he says, leading him down a corridor. It seems to head back in the way they’ve come, but it’s too dark to tell, so he trails his fingertips along the wall to find the powerlines. He sends up an impulse, powering up the connected lights, and a fluorescent glow fills the corridor. His heart misses a beat when he sees an outline of a person stood right in his path, and he jerks in place when he realises it’s Renjun, small and unassuming and smiling mildly. He’s looking dead into his eyes when Renjun says **_stop._**

Hendery stops. Sicheng stops behind him too, and Hendery wants to scream at him to run, but he can’t do anything but stop and stare. He desperately wants to look away, but he can’t. He just stops.

 ** _Hello_** _,_ Renjun says, the picture of politeness, and the sound of his voice crowds Hendery’s free ear. Renjun jerks his head, and Sicheng’s hand comes up to pull the other earbud out, leaving them in roaring silence. He feels more than hears the impact of the earbuds crunching under heavy boots, and realises with a sinking feeling that no one here is unaffected. All eight boys will try to kill them. Renjun is about to kill him. **_What’s your name?_**

“Wong Kunhang,” he says, and fresh fear floods him, because he hasn’t even told anyone at the hideout his real name. Renjun had pulled it out of him in a second, his one secret taken from him so easily.

 ** _It’s nice to meet you,_** Renjun says quietly, his eyes never leaving his. **_What’s your ability?_**

“Technopath,” he hears himself say, without missing a beat. “I can manipulate the electrical signals of devices.”

 ** _Ah_** _,_ Renjun sighs. **_I see why they brought you._** He smiles, like he’s pleased. **_Now. I need you to do something for me._**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you again for your comments last chapter!! it's interesting and delightful to see your thoughts and reactions, and i'm so grateful for the remarks about the memory converstaion particularly. i was really hopeful that would pull off well. please don't hesitate to let me know if you have any thoughts about this chapter too :)


	4. Donghyuck

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A recap of the abilities revealed so far:  
> Taeyong: Teleportation  
> Jungwoo: Superspeed  
> Sungchan: Vibrations/quakes  
> Hendery: Technopath  
> Ten: Cat shapeshifting  
> Yangyang: No power  
> Jeno: Material manipulation  
> Jaemin: Memory manipulation/exploration  
> Dejun: Weather creation/manipulation  
> Donghyuck: Explosions  
> Chenle: Superhuman combat abilities  
> Mark: Foresight  
> Kun: Healing  
> Doyoung: Illusions  
> Jaehyun: Density manipulation  
> Sicheng: Empath/mood manipulation  
> Lucas: Unbreakable body  
> Johnny: Superstrength  
> Yuta: Force fields  
> Taeil: Energy manipulation  
> Renjun: Compulsion - mind/body control  
> Jisung: Disintegration
> 
> I'm also going to add a minor content warning in the [end notes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28479645/chapters/70661412#chapter_4_endnotes) for smth that isn't in the work tags! This chapter is the heaviest in terms of fighting & violence i think. hope u enjoy :)

He tries to focus on ripping Lucas’s gigantic fucking man-hands away from Jungwoo’s throat, and not on the spectacularly nasty sounds a feral Ten is making behind him, leaping and scratching and snarling at Jaehyun, scrabbling around in his peripheral vision. Jungwoo is so red in the face that Donghyuck is kind of worried he might start spitting blood anytime now.

“Last chance!” he yells, over the roaring bass in his ears. “I swear to God, Yukhei, let him go!”

Lucas is so far gone it’s scary— under normal circumstances he would never hurt a fly if he could help it, and here he is choking Jungwoo almost to death. Donghyuck had thought he couldn’t hate SM more than he already did, then he had to come here and see this shitshow.

“Alright!” he yells, hands hot, fire pulsing in his veins. “You asked for it!”

The boom that’s been building in him until now, the budding explosion he couldn’t let out earlier pools into in the tension of his fingers, hot, hotter, until—

“Hide!” he shouts for Jungwoo’s sake, hoping the poor guy can hear him and cover his face as much as he can. Donghyuck takes his hands from Lucas’s solid arms to press them against his side instead, and lets the explosion out right there, into his skin. The song in his ears climaxes right as he does, then abruptly cuts out.

The almighty bang he makes echoes around the corridor, and hell, they’re definitely getting a spot on the headlines now, no matter how things go for them from here. Lucas goes flying, propelled by the force of the blast, all the windows along the corridor shattering at the same time. Donghyuck himself is thrown back by it, and Jungwoo is also propelled into the nearest wall, folding into himself with his chest wracking as he tries to choke air back into his lungs.

With the muffling music gone, he can hear the impact Lucas makes with the far wall and window frame with startling clarity. It’s loud and heavy, but there’s no sound from Lucas himself. Although he can’t be broken, he’s not immune to pain, and being rattled by an explosive force can’t be a walk in the park even for someone like him. Being under mind control probably negates all that, he expects, and is proved right when Lucas is only still for a few seconds after he’s hit the wall. Then he’s rolling over, planting his hands on the floor, and pushing himself up to stand again, stretching his limbs out with a groan. Donghyuck picks himself up too, walking over to stand in front of Jungwoo before Lucas can.

Lucas grins, perfect teeth glinting in the light. Several of the window bars closest to them have completely blown out, and there are shards of metal and pieces of glass in Lucas’s hair. He stalks towards Donghyuck, who holds his hands out and yells, “Take cover!”

Rather than the built-up impact of before, he fires at him with a rally of smaller, contained explosions, fast and concentrated on Lucas. Lucas is pushed back by them at first, then stops to adjust—and like some sort of crazy action star, simply puts his arm up to shield his eyes, and starts to move again. Like he’s facing a particularly heavy storm and not an actual fucking wall of fire, he braces himself and starts to walk forwards, pushing against the force of the explosions.

“Lucas!” he yells again, and his voice rings around the hallway over the concurrent bangs coming from his hands. “Can you snap out of it already?”

Lucas pushes on, coming closer, and Donghyuck feels fear rise in his throat again—there’s not much else he can do, and if Lucas gets a hold of him too—

There’s movement in the corner of his eye, and he glances away to see Jungwoo pushing himself up, face flushed. He catches Donghyuck’s eye, and Donghyuck nods. Jungwoo isn’t in a good state right now, but he needs all the help he can get.

He retracts his hands suddenly, the last bang echoing around the space, and Lucas stumbles in surprise. He barely takes another step forward to advance on Donghyuck before Jungwoo rushes into him, using the opportunity to push hard and propel him backwards, straight through the broken window behind him. Lucas goes right over the ledge, falling straight down the outside of the building. They hear a shout, and then a thud, and Donghyuck runs forwards to peer over the ledge.

Lucas is laid on the ground two floors down, the concrete under him slightly cracked. He’s still, and silent, and Donghyuck’s heart seizes in his chest. Fuck. He doesn’t think Lucas has ever pushed his limits this much, not as long as he’s known him, and if they’ve managed to push him too far—

Then a groan echoes up the courtyard, and Lucas grimaces, slowly bringing a hand to his head.

“Holy shit,” Donghyuck says, leaning back and breathing hard. “I can’t believe you just did that.”

“He deserved it,” Jungwoo huffs, his voice croaking out uncomfortably. Further up the corridor it seems that Jaehyun has disappeared again, leaving Ten standing very still, ears twitching as he listens out for danger.

“This is such a train wreck,” Donghyuck says, dipping back into Sicheng’s room. He’s gone, along with Hendery. “Where the hell did those two go?”

Ten transforms back so quickly he swears he can hear something pop. Or perhaps that’s just the paw/hand he’s cradling to his front, several fingers looking horribly crooked. “Jaehyun fights dirty. Don’t underestimate him. We need to get back to Taeyong.”

“What do we do about Lucas?” he asks.

“Leave him,” Ten says. “If their orders are to round us up, he’ll find his way back to us.”

“Is there anyone else up here?” Jungwoo asks.

“Just—” Donghyuck starts, but he’s cut off by the sound of quick footsteps, and Ten shouting,

“Look out!”

A body leaps on him from behind, teeth biting into his shoulder, and he staggers under the weight, crying out. There are hands clawing at his face, fingernails digging into his eyes, but Jungwoo speeds to his side before they can do any real damage—the weight disappears, replaced by the sound of a body hitting the hallway floor. He turns to see Hendery there, pushing himself back onto his feet without a moment’s hesitation and swinging a punch at Jungwoo.

“Fuck!” he yells, going for the handcuffs on his belt.

“Renjun must’ve got to him!” Ten shouts before shifting back into the great orange tiger, now limping on his front paw.

It’s a small blessing that it was Hendery, out of everyone in their party, who Renjun managed to corner. He doesn’t have any combat training or any real offensive traits in his ability, and the hits he swings at Jungwoo are sloppy, easy for Jungwoo to dodge without using his speed. One advantage he does have is his reckless abandon—with Renjun’s influence in his veins, Donghyuck knows he’s feeling the burning need to do his task well, the ache to follow every order without concern for his own wellbeing. Hendery knows perfectly well what he’s doing right now, but Renjun’s influence completely overrides his autonomy to stop doing it.

Jungwoo is still out of breath and beaten down though, and it gives Hendery opportunity to get his hands on Jungwoo’s hair, wrenching him to the ground. Donghyuck catches his wrist as he does, yanking it behind his back and clipping the cuff on tight. He runs him into the nearest wall, and Hendery struggles against him so hard Donghyuck is more concerned about what he might do to himself if he hits his head too hard.

“Hey!” he shouts. “You can’t follow any order if you’re unconscious!”

That stops his thrashing for half a second, which is long enough for Donghyuck to cage his other wrist, bringing it back into the cuffs. He pushes Hendery to his knees, hands on his shoulders to keep him there, at minimal risk to himself and others.

Apparently he can’t even have this victory, though, because at that moment the figure of Jaehyun phases through the wall in front of him to punch Donghyuck in the face.

Jungwoo speeds to his feet, going to grab him, but only runs right through him again. Ten joins the fray, back for revenge, and Jaehyun swipes out for him—Ten intercepts his fist between his teeth, biting down, but his mouth snaps shut around nothing.

This is getting ridiculous. Hendery is suddenly docile, seemingly thrown off by Jaehyun’s presence, so it’s the three of them against this guy with the powers of that one Avenger nobody really cares about. This shouldn’t be such a hard fight, but their problem is that Jaehyun is a good fighter, and excellent at controlling his ability, and knows exactly how to combine the two to his advantage. He can manifest at the right time to make punches before becoming intangible enough to avoid hits back, so he’d phase through one of Donghyuck’s explosions, no problem—what they need here is a hard hitter like Chenle, who can fight faster than Jaehyun could keep up with.

It’s still three on one, though. He can’t avoid all of them at once, surely—all Donghyuck needs to do is look for an opening, then hit him hard.

Jungwoo is slowing down fast, worn down from his injuries and the extent he’s used his ability already—he’s more of a sprinter than a marathon runner when it comes to his ability. Still, he’s able to get a few steady kicks in as Jaehyun is preoccupied with Ten. The problem with the two of them standing on either side of him is this: when Ten leaps for his head, taking his chances as Jaehyun stumbles back from Jungwoo’s kick, he can only go straight through him and land on Jungwoo, sending them both to the floor. Jaehyun turns, and Donghyuck can tell that he’d deliberately taken the kick to bait them into this. The two of them come to a rolling stop on the floor, and Ten is already turning on his heels, but he’s not fast enough.

Jaehyun is stalking towards Donghyuck, fast, and Donghyuck suppresses every urge he has to blast him to hell, because that’s exactly what Jaehyun will expect. Instead he backs away, hands reaching for the wall behind him in a show of fear, and then Jaehyun has his hands on Donghyuck’s arms, trying to push him back out of the window after Lucas.

“Gotcha,” Donghyuck says, quickly bracing himself against the push and bringing his hands in front of him. To get up close with Donghyuck means Jaehyun has to grab him, be physical. It means Jaehyun has to manifest.

His blast hits Jaehyun squarely in his chest, sending him flying back and slamming into the opposite wall, tangible enough to leave a dent. When he falls to the floor and doesn’t move, the three of them stand there and stare at him for a few seconds, breathing heavily. Jungwoo is the one to kneel and check for his pulse—he’s just unconscious, the skin of his neck and face scalded red.

“Finally,” he huffs. “That’s what’s supposed to happen when I explode people.” He feels bad, behind the bravado—he knows Jaehyun will have some nasty burn marks on his chest to wake up to later. Hopefully they can get him to Kun quickly enough to leave minimal scarring.

Hendery, now that Jaehyun is out for the count, tries to leap up again. Ten pounces and lays him out flat before he can even get to his feet.

“This is all a big distraction,” Jungwoo says, breathless. “Hendery, too. We have to find the others, fast.”

“Yes,” he agrees, batting Ten away from the poor guy before he can get some angry claw mark scars to mark the occasion. He pulls Hendery to his feet, keeping his arms pulled tight behind his back, and pushes him forward. “Come on, man, let’s get you back home.”

“And Jaehyun?” Jungwoo asks, gesturing to the boy on the floor.

“Like I said,” Ten says, stalking down the corridor without looking back. “I’m sure he’ll find us.”

Jungwoo fidgets like he wants to protest, but neither he nor Ten are in a state to carry him, so it’s not like they have much of a choice. Donghyuck pushes a writhing Hendery down the hall, hands firm, trying not to let him slip down the stairs with his reckless scrambling.

“Where was Renjun, Hendery?” he asks, loud and clear, but he knows it’s a long shot. Renjun is too thorough to leave loopholes in his orders, especially if he’s thinking like an SM superior right now. Hendery just snarls like an honest to God dog in response, so Donghyuck tightens his grip and pushes him down the hallway they came through, back through unlocked doors, still quiet and dark.

SM must have known they were coming. There’s no other explanation for the amount of coordination the others have, the influence they’re all suffering under despite Jaemin’s insistence that their minds were crystal clear last night. Lucas had looked so out of it, his pupils blown, sweating all over like he’s on some sort of super-soldier steroids. Renjun and Sicheng had been almost believably aware and alert, but when he thinks about it, they had the dark eyes and blown pupils, too. Influence that runs blood-deep, rooted in the subconscious, perhaps. If that’s true, they can only rely on the effects of the drugs wearing off in a few hours. He can’t think of another way to bring them out of this and get them home without any more injuries, not without leaving anyone behind again. It’s unthinkable to give up on this mission, but they don’t have the time to sit around and wait for them to snap out of it. SM would send in an artillery before letting Taeyong and the rest of them slip away again.

When they reach the split corridors where they had left the other two teams earlier, Ten leaps in front of him protectively, angled to face the route to the basement. The ground down here is cracked and broken where it wasn’t before, and part of one of the walls has fallen in on itself to reveal an empty lab room beyond. Further down the hallway a light is flickering, revealing the crumbled floor and remains of the doorway that used to lead into the basement. It’s completely collapsed now, blocking the way downstairs with a pile of concrete and brick.

Jungwoo swears beside him, running up the corridor to call out for the friends they’d sent that way. “Yuta? Chenle?”

There’s nothing. It’s dark in here, and the basement has collapsed, and a sudden grief hits Donghyuck like a freight train.

“Shit,” he says, gripping Hendery hard, who’s trying to twist around and headbutt him. “God, no.”

“Hello?” Jungwoo shouts again, hands hovering over the pieces of concrete like he’s considering moving every fragment aside with his bare hands to reach them.

Ten comes to his side, focused on the rubble, and they both stay quiet to let him listen for whatever he’s hearing. Then Donghyuck faintly hears it too—Chenle’s high pitched yell, barely filtering up through the wreckage.

“Hey!” Jungwoo yells. “We’re here! Are you stuck?”

Chenle’s voice shouts up again, a little clearer this time. “Keep yelling!”

Ten transforms back to join Jungwoo in shouting, and Donghyuck pitches in his own voice, too. Being the loudest person in any given room is one of his many talents, and they all know this hasn’t been a stealth mission for one goddamn second anyway. “You better have a good explanation for this, Zhong Chenle, or I swear to God I’ll kill you myself!”

The rubble shifts, seemingly on its own, and then a shining silver band becomes visible— it’s the top of Yuta’s dome, pushing up against the pile from underneath to tunnel them out. Donghyuck holds his breath as Jungwoo and Ten move as much of the wreckage aside as they can, and Yuta’s shining barrier pushes through stronger, cresting at ankle height. It pushes up again, then finally emerges in one hard movement to bring them out to ground floor level. Yuta releases his shield as they pass through, letting the top layer of wreckage settle around their shins, and he reaches out to Ten for a hand up. He sways when he steps out, overexerted from pushing through tons of rock to get them both out of there, but eyes up the four of them quickly, alert. The way Yuta always manages to be such a badass with a purely protective ability constantly amazes him.

Chenle gulps in lungfuls of air, coming up to hug Jungwoo once he’s pulled free of the wreckage too. He meets Donghyuck’s eyes over Jungwoo’s shoulder, and the look on his face makes Donghyuck’s heart dip.

“Meeting old friends not go as well as you’d hoped?” he asks, backing away from where Hendery is trying to stomp on his feet. “Join the club, Lele.”

“What happened down there?” Jungwoo asks, smoothing down Chenle’s dark hair. “Are you okay?”

“He didn’t even know who I was,” Chenle says, voice wobbling. “It’s like he wasn’t even there. I tried to talk to him, but he just—just—”

“Crumbled the building foundations around us instead,” Yuta fills in, leaning heavily against Ten. “What happened to him?” He nods his head towards Hendery, who’s started trying to tear himself away from Donghyuck so violently he’s worried he might dislocate an arm.

“Renjun,” he grunts, and Hendery finally yanks himself free, swivelling to face Donghyuck with crazed triumph. Barely a second later, he’s caged by a silver dome, his shoulder ramming into it as he’s stopped just inches away from Donghyuck, battering himself up against the barrier fruitlessly.

“Thanks,” Donghyuck breathes, glancing at Yuta, who’s staring hard at Hendery.

“That’s not Renjun,” Chenle says, disturbed. “He wouldn’t ask someone to do that.”

“SM via Renjun, whatever, it’s all semantics. Point is, we need a plan to snap them out of it and we need it now, or this is all for nothing,” Ten says. “If they’re all like this, we can’t take them back to the hideout.”

“What if Jaemin could do it?” Chenle says, and Donghyuck looks at him.

“Do what?”

“Snap them out of it. If it’s mind control, surely he can do something against it?”

“I asked him about that,” Ten says. “He doesn’t think so. He said he can’t access the subconscious at all, and attempts at brainwashing are typically planted there.”

“If it’s the only idea we have, we need to try,” Donghyuck says. “Taeyong could bring him here in a second, and then we’d know. At least we could say we tried it.”

“Okay,” Yuta says, gesturing to the corridor ahead of them. “Then let’s go.”

Donghyuck turns, and Hendery starts being bulldozed ahead of them by Yuta’s fortified shield like a bug against a windscreen wiper, and the whole situation would be laughable if he wasn’t still bloodstained from Hendery’s manic biting earlier. Chenle stumbles for a moment as they head back down the corridor, and they all pretend not to notice—Yuta manages to keep Hendery steady, but he’s pink-cheeked and sweaty all over, and Donghyuck wonders how much longer he can last.

It doesn’t seem to be far to reach the rest of their group, at least—there’s this strange, omniscient crackling of static coming from the right-hand corridor, calling them all towards what’s probably a training room. Two big doors stand ahead of them, and Donghyuck takes a quick look around at the others before stepping forwards to open them, sensing Ten shifting beside him. The heady static increases tenfold when they enter the room, and Donghyuck wonders for a hot second if he’s sustained a brain injury, because it’s hard to understand what he’s seeing.

The doors don’t open up into a room, but rather a wide expansion of desert earth that goes on for longer than it logically should. The sky spreads out above them, as blue as the middle of the day, a group of big ugly birds cawing over the static noise. Around the doorway, the hard ground is distorting—when he turns his head, he can see the sky rippling oddly too, right where the walls of the room should be. Is this an illusion, some sort of ability like Doyoung’s? He can barely consider it before one of the birds swoops low, screeching a warning at him as he reels back. It sure as fuck feels real.

Sungchan is to their immediate right, breathing hard as he sends a wave of pulsing vibrational energy towards Johnny, who’s pushing himself against it like Lucas had been earlier. To their left, a boy stands where there should probably be a far wall, but is only a twisted tree against the landscape—his face is kind, but he watches the room with blank eyes, just like the others had. Shotaro. The image around them must be his ability—some kind of manifestation? Taeyong is blipping in and out around the room like he’s trying to teleport, but struggling against his own ability—one second he’s grappling at the floor, only to reappear a few feet away, shouting something at Shotaro. His words are distorted as he’s pulled away again.

Directly ahead of them, Taeil has Dejun gripped in his arms. Dejun is sinking down to his knees, his storm overhead dispersing quickly, and Taeil face is expressionless as he watches him slump against the floor. Ten snarls and leaps across the room towards Taeil, who only looks up calmly, changing his stance and preparing to brawl.

To their right, Johnny advances closer and closer to Sungchan, close enough to reach for his arm—almost grabs him before a shining wall appears in front of Sungchan, blocking him from harm. Yuta stalks towards Johnny, arm outstretched, and Jungwoo runs ahead of him, a blur of newfound determination.

Hendery is still in his own shining bubble beside Donghyuck, but he’s standing still now, trying to make sense of the room they’ve found themselves in. Chenle looks around too, gaping.

Taeyong appears in front of them, grabbing onto Donghyuck with both hands. “Hyuck! I need you to get to Shotaro!”

He blinks, and then they’re both stood on the other side of the room, behind Ten’s fight with Taeil, Sungchan limping over to help. “What’s his ability?” Donghyuck asks, gripping Taeyong right back.

“I don’t know, but whatever he’s doing is sending my power wacky,” he says, and then they’re in the far corner of the room, watching Shotaro from behind. “We can’t leave here until he’s stopped.”

“I’ll get to him, but you have to bring Jaemin here as soon as you’re working again.”

“Why?” Taeyong asks, and then they’re far too close for comfort to Jungwoo’s and Yuta’s rally against Johnny, a mixture of solid defence and fast offense. Johnny is strong, and a good fighter, but Jungwoo and Yuta have trained together for a long time now, know exactly how to dance around each other to make the most impact.

“He’s our only chance at getting through to them. Whatever SM has done, Jaemin might be able to clear their minds of it.”

“Okay. I’ll try.” Blink, and they’re back by the doors.

“Don’t take Hendery back until we have Renjun clear, either. Dejun might need to get to Kun, though.” Blink. They’re behind the tree again.

Taeyong nods. “Got it. Don’t hurt Shotaro, Hyuck. He can’t help it.” Taeyong releases his arms, and then he’s gone.

“Then what do you want me to do?” he asks thin air, watching the back of Shotaro’s head. “Read him a bedtime story?”

Shotaro turns to look him dead in the eye, like he’d heard him over all the other noise in the room. Unbelievably, he smiles at him, a sweet thing that makes Donghyuck’s heart sink. He can’t believe he has to lay this kid out for nothing but manifesting a few birds.

“Alright,” he says, hands raised. “I’m going to ask nicely, just one time. Can you quit it?”

As sweet as it looks, Shotaro’s eyes don’t turn up with his smile, but remain blank and uncomprehending. He looks up at the birds, watching them do a loop of the desert-room, then says something in Japanese, pointing at the false sky above them.

Donghyuck turns his eyes up, watching the great black birds swoop around. “I don’t know what you said, but I don’t think it was a _yes, of course Donghyuck, I’ll do that for you now_ sort of answer.”

The birds caw loudly, then form close together, before swooping down towards Donghyuck.

“Hey! Come on, man!” he yells, holding his hands to the sky, sending off a series of explosions that he hopes will kill these awful death-apparition beings. It seems to, judging by the terrible screeching that follows and the thump of bodies around him. He cautiously raises his head, looking around—they’re all on the floor, smoking or dismembered. It’s the first time he’s killed something bigger than a mosquito with his ability.

Shotaro is looking down at the smouldering birds sadly. Donghyuck puts his hands up, walking forwards with more intent this time.

“Cut it out! You hear me?” Blasting Jaehyun away to avoid Donghyuck’s almost certain murder had been one thing. He’s not sure he can set fire to this kid and his round, cute cheeks. “Stop it!”

Shotaro lifts his head, and his expression twists into one of discomfort, but he’s looking somewhere past Donghyuck. Against his better judgement, he turns to see what’s so interesting: it’s the blue sky behind him rippling, like it had been around the open door before but on a much larger scale, like the whole wall behind it is becoming unstable. The illusion shattering, maybe, bending under something—the sky is appearing flatter by the second rather than infinite, Shotaro’s ability struggling against a hidden pressure. Then Donghyuck registers the rumbling under his feet, and takes several steps back—what the hell is that?

He whips around, but Sungchan is still fighting Taeil, his vibrational ability meeting Taeil’s energy blast like some sort of Expelliarmus-Avada Kedavra tribute act. This shaking is separate, coming from the wall itself. It’s putting Shotaro on his knees, whatever it is, has him shaking all over. The whole desert is crumbling now, shorting out like a bad image until it sputters out completely, and all they’re left with is the dim, grey training hall. Then he sees what’s wrong.

The wall in front of them is deteriorating fast, and in the growing gaps of falling plaster and brick he can see several figures standing behind it. Jisung, for one, running his hand against the wall absently, watching it crumble down as he passes, the whole structure groaning under his casual upheaval. Renjun is stood next to him, waiting patiently. Sicheng is there too, a little further back, watching the gap unfold.

Taeyong appears next to Donghyuck, ability apparently stable now, glancing back at Shotaro. He’s on his knees, trembling and clutching at his head. This kid has an ability that can block Taeyong’s teleportation, which effectively traps them all here without killing him—and perhaps SM hadn’t known this, because why else would Jisung and friends sabotage that just to make a dramatic entrance? Why not make sure Shotaro keeps them here until they’re all beaten?

“Taeyong,” Renjun says, voice clear, and Donghyuck fights the urge to look at him directly. Here he goes again, looking for Taeyong. Donghyuck doesn’t like it one bit.

“Renjun,” Taeyong responds cautiously, looking far to Renjun’s left. “Good to see you. How have you been?”

“Yuta!” Donghyuck yells, slowly backing up. “Could really use you over here!” No one else but Yuta should come into close combat with Jisung. His ability is too dangerous, too new—he doubts Jisung could control it even if he had a clear mind.

“Wonderful,” Renjun answers pleasantly. “We’ve missed you, here.”

“Jisung!” Chenle calls, running up behind Donghyuck. Towards the danger instead of away from it, like an idiot. “Jisung, look at me!”

He grabs Chenle’s wrist before he can run into the arms of death. Jisung doesn’t look up from the wall he’s examining, watching the dust run through his fingers. “You can’t help him right now, Chenle! Hyung, it’s time to go and get Jaemin please!”

Except when he looks over, Taeyong’s breathing has completely shortened out, and he’s doubling over to grip his knees. Donghyuck wonders if he’s been hit by something in the one second he wasn’t paying attention, but everyone else in the room is still occupied.

“C-can’t,” he stammers out, and Donghyuck stares, because he’s never heard Taeyong sound anything but calm and collected before. He recognises the shake of his hands, though, and looks up at Sicheng, who’s focusing hard on Taeyong. Fuck.

“It’s not real,” he says quickly, dragging Chenle backwards as Renjun slowly advances on them. “Taeyong, you’re not really afraid, it’s Sicheng. You can go. You can! It’s your power, not his! Don’t let him have it!”

“Oh, shit,” Taeyong says, and his knees buckle. Chenle’s attention snaps to him, and they both move at the same time to drag Taeyong back to his feet. Whatever Renjun wants Taeyong for, he knows they need to prevent it at all costs.

“Yuta!” he yells again, turning his head to look for his hyung. Yuta is glancing their way too, but is preoccupied with keeping Johnny under his dome. Jungwoo is staggering away from their fight to slump against a far wall, battered and bleeding—Johnny must have gotten a hold of him, and Yuta has resorted to keeping him contained.

Alright, fair. If they let Johnny loose, that’s the battle lost. Donghyuck tilts his head, weighing up his options—if he tries to blast Renjun or Sicheng to kingdom come, he knows Jisung will be on him in a second, and Jisung is the most potentially destructive person in the room. The only one who can take care of this is Yuta: if he can push Jisung away, maybe Chenle could get to Sicheng, and that would free up Taeyong to bring in help and get their injured out of here.

“Swap!” he yells, meeting Yuta’s eyes, who nods at him. Donghyuck turns to Chenle. “Whatever you do, keep Taeyong away from Renjun. And hit Sicheng hard if you need to.” Then he starts running towards Yuta’s side of the room, past where Ten is tearing into Taeil’s leg with his bloody tiger teeth.

Yuta watches him approach, and shouts out, “Three, two, one…!”

On one, the dome is released, and Yuta takes off back in the way Donghyuck had come. Johnny falters with his newfound freedom for a second, glancing over at Jungwoo. Donghyuck continues to run towards him, building up everything he has left into his hands, his last batch of energy pushing up hot and raw in the tips of his fingers, pooling in the palm of his hand.

“Sorry, Hyung!” he shouts, coming to a stop a few metres in front of Johnny and bracing his feet against the hardwood floor. “You can scold me later!”

Johnny looks up at him, and Donghyuck releases the blast. It’s a big one, rocking the whole room, but he tries to keep the heat minimal—he doesn’t want to roast Johnny alive like bad barbeque. He’s still his hyung, after all.

The eruption sends Johnny slamming into the cracked wall behind him. He’s already sporting a split lip and angry red marks up one arm—Jungwoo’s work, he expects—and now his skin is red and smarting as he staggers to his hands and knees. Half of their best fighters have gone up against Johnny already, and he still pushes himself up to his feet, facing Donghyuck with that empty, determined look all the others have.

He probably can’t win this. Johnny’s strength isn’t just literal, but his stamina and endurance are ridiculously good too—if Jisung wasn’t here, he’d be the most dangerous person in the room. But Donghyuck only needs to hold him off for as long as it takes for Taeyong to get Jaemin here—and god, they’re holding on by a thread at this point, by the hope that Jaemin can do something he doesn’t believe is possible. But it has to be. He has no choice but to hope for that.

“What, you didn’t like that?” he says, breathless. His hands are rough and sore from how much he’s exerted his ability so far, but he’s far from done yet. “You want to hit me or something?”

Johnny starts advancing again, eyes set on Donghyuck, and he knows he doesn’t have the firepower in him for another big boom. He’ll have to use his other favourite trick.

“Oh, so you do want to hit me?” he says, backing up quickly. “Come on then, big boy. I’ve been practising while I was away.”

Johnny swipes for him, all power and strength, and Donghyuck times it just right—he has his hands set behind him, facing downwards. He releases two explosions, strong enough to propel his own bodyweight into the air in a controlled jump—he does the same again, six feet in the air, to dodge Johnny’s reach for him.

“Ha! Can’t catch me!” A third blast sends him straight over Johnny’s head, then drops him hard onto the floor, where he lands on his feet. It gives him a close shot of Johnny, which he takes, because the last thing he wants is for Johnny to get his hands on him. Though nowhere as near as strong as the first explosion, the blow still knocks Johnny forward, stumbling away. Donghyuck backs up too, taking this opportunity to glance over at the others—Yuta has Jisung cornered, and Chenle is running over to Sicheng, who’s now trying to flee the room. This is good. Chenle could take him out in one blow, and then Taeyong will be able to get help. For a beautiful second, he feels like they might have a chance.

The second is beautiful while it lasts.

He keeps Johnny in his peripheral, still gathering himself several meters away from Donghyuck, but he makes the fatal mistake of keeping his back to the hall wall. Sungchan and Taeil are exchanging such noisy bursts of energy and rumbling waves of quakes in front of him that he doesn’t hear them, doesn’t see them, but one minute he’s on his feet and the next he’s roughly pushed in Johnny’s direction, skidding across the floor. When he looks up, it’s to see Jaehyun passing by him, one hand on Lucas’s arm, the other having just pushed Donghyuck; they must have phased right through the outer wall to get here. Jaehyun shoots him one long, dark look, and then he’s running after Sicheng and Chenle, with Lucas splitting off to play bodyguard to the now vulnerable Renjun. And fuck, Donghyuck is on the floor, trying to scramble away but Johnny is right there, hands on his wrists, pinning him onto his front. A knee comes to his back, and he can’t push against his weight at all. His grip is like iron, and he’s pressing down on Donghyuck’s back hard, and something in his chest cracks loudly under the pressure. There’s a shooting, burning pain in his ribs, and his ears are ringing, and it _hurts_.

He cries out, but Jungwoo is unconscious against the far wall and Ten is limping across the room on his own, and no one else is close enough to help. Who could even move Johnny? Is this it? Has he lost? He can’t bring in air properly, can’t do anything but lie there with Johnny’s weight on him, breaths getting shorter and shorter as his lungs burn and burn. But Johnny could kill him in second. He’s dragging it out. Why?

Perhaps he can’t do it. Perhaps his conscience is finally peeking through.

“Hyung,” he rasps out, and it sends fresh pain blooming in his chest, but God, if he can get through to him—“Hyung, please, don’t kill me, please—”

His vision is blurring, his head fucking aches, his lungs are screaming and burning. In front of him, he can feel the reverberating wave of energy rip through the room as Taeil finally triumphs over Sungchan, sending him flying back into a heap. Despite his bloody legs and the claw marks over his arms, Taeil simply turns and starts to walk towards the trembling Taeyong, who doesn’t notice him coming from behind.

“Tae—“ he tries to shout, but he can’t breathe, can’t see properly, the ringing in his head is too loud, and he can’t help but worry that Johnny will take it too hard if he kills Donghyuck like this, without even knowing he’s done it. “Hyung!” he cries out, voice breaking.

It’s no good. Just as Taeyong is getting to his feet, Taeil grabs him from behind, draining him again immediately. He bodily pushes him over to Renjun, and Taeyong can’t do anything but stumble over, barely upright.

With a steady, deliberate hand, Johnny is pushing Donghyuck’s head against the hall floor. This isn’t his conscience acting against programming after all—he’s just trying to make Donghyuck pass out, avoid killing him. Keep him in one piece for SM.

Fuck them. He’s going to kill every scientist that did this to his friends.

The angle tilts his view, but with the noisy fights now over, he can easily hear Renjun’s voice above the rush of blood in his ears.

“Taeyong,” he says, voice quiet but commanding. “Look at me.”

Taeil tilts Taeyong’s head back with a hand in his hair. Donghyuck’s vision is going black at the edges.

“Take us to your hiding place. Take us to the others.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CONTENT WARNING: there's some minor animal death in this chapter, pretty brief but it's onscreen (it's not ten!). if you want to skip it, scroll past donghyuck's dialogue with shotaro, to the paragraphs after it about to the wall. there's also an instance of characters being trapped and if that sort of thing could upset claustrophobia, pls watch out when they go looking for the basement.
> 
> thank you again for your comments so far!! it's so lovely to know you're enjoying so much, and seeing people scared by this renjun is kind of flattering and totally what i was going for. soft spoken renjun who will kill u is my son.
> 
> i've made good progress with editing and i'm nearing the end of the work now, so the last few chapters should all be up over the next week! ch5 will come tomorrow since 4 + 5 are a bit on the shorter side. thank you as always for reading, and pls don't hesitate to let me know your thoughts :)


	5. Mark

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm going to put a more major content warning in the [end notes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28479645/chapters/70731663#chapter_5_endnotes) this time, but it's related to something that's already in the tags! however if you've been at all sensitive to anything so far i recommend checking it!!
> 
> enjoy :D

He spends the whole day before the mission in a restless state, unable to concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes at a time. It’s always like this right before a big decision, or an impactful event in his life: sensations he can’t understand flit through him, all-consuming and frightening feelings that he can’t explain, loitering for a few moments before disappearing. They probably won’t make sense until later, when he can match the feeling to the event, and he won’t be able to settle properly until things are set into motion—the outcome of the mission will be clearer once the others have set off. He’s always been of the opinion that his ability working on such short-term knowledge really just makes him a bad prophet, because the future being so much clearer to see once it’s already started happening is surely obvious to anyone. He can’t really give anyone a proper heads-up about anything, and what good is that, when you can only see danger coming once it’s already on route?

Sometimes, he thinks he has a lot in common with meteorologists. He could say broadly that it’ll rain next week, but is much more certain about the time it’ll start to pour once the black clouds start forming. Most of the time, he’s just a really good guesser. Other times, he sees things so clearly it scares him.

“We need to hide,” he says, pulling himself from his thoughts. His words halt the tentative conversation in the hall from the others, Doyoung and Yangyang trying to keep them optimistic and prepared for the others to return. He’s not sure how long it’s been since they left—the beginning of such important events often send him into a daze, as he is now, sat on the sports hall floor with feelings and instincts slotting into place inside his head.

“What?” Kun asks, attentive. It’s always embarrassing when this happens, when his words can stop a whole room, but he knows there’s a good reason for it.

“They’re—oh. Yes. Renjun is going to make Taeyong come back for us, so that they can root the rest of us out. They want to know where we’re hiding, who else we have with us. He wants…” he trails off, looking around the room. Renjun will be here in less than thirty minutes. “SM want to pick us all off at once. They knew we were coming.”

“What about the others? Are they okay?”

He shakes his head. It’s confusing—things feels bad, but somehow he’s not worried, and he can’t figure out what the juxtaposition means. “I don’t know. It could be bad, could be good. I think we have something that can tip the scales….” he trails off, tapping against his thigh. “We’ve just got to find it. We can hide, and... help them.”

“Wait, so they’ve all got the SM brain worms?” Yangyang says. “And we have something to prevent the mission from being a bust?”

“Is it a thing or a person?” Jeno asks. “Is it Jaemin?”

“It’s not me,” Jaemin says. “It can’t be.”

“I don’t—" he sighs and grips his head, quickly becoming overwhelmed, as tends to happen when people ask too many questions. He doesn’t do specifics. He just does vague feelings and instincts, and occasionally, startling certainties. “It’s something here. They left it behind, so it has to be us who turns the tide. We’ve got to figure it out and wait for them to come. But we can’t let them take us back.”

“It has to be you,” Jeno says, turning to face Jaemin head-on. “We don’t have anything else here that could help them.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” he says, forehead creased. “It can’t be me. I can’t even do proper mind reading! How am I supposed to help them if they’re in that sort of state?”

“You don’t know what their minds look like when they’re not themselves,” Kun says. “It might be as easy as bringing up a familiar memory. If Renjun can remember you, if you help him stop repressing his own personality and what he truly wants, he won’t harm you, right?”

Jaemin hugs himself, anxiety written into his stance. “I don’t know.”

“We have to try.” Jeno holds his elbows gently, looking into his eyes. “We could be wrong. But when they come, you’ll at least try, right?”

“Of course I’ll try. But I can’t promise anything.”

“That’s all you can do,” Doyoung nods. “In case it is something else, does anyone have any ideas?”

Mark shifts, trying to focus in on the certainty that there’s a _thing,_ but it’s not becoming any clearer. It’s here. That’s all he knows.

“Perhaps Jeno could make something?” Yangyang says, but even he sounds doubtful.

“Make what?” Jeno asks. “I’m not God.”

“An SM instant kill button?”

“If only,” Doyoung sighs.

There’s a short pause, and then Kun asks, “Should some of us run? If we have time to get away, isn’t it better to be far away from here rather than waiting for danger to come?”

“What, these three?” Doyoung asks, pointing at Mark, Yangyang, and Jeno. “I was thinking that.”

“I can’t go,” Mark says, staring at a piece of floor absently. “I shouldn’t go.” The others tend to take him seriously when he starts muttering to himself, so that’s all it takes to convince them about him. Jeno and Yangyang, however—

“No way,” Jeno says, as Doyoung looks at him imploringly. “You never know what might happen. What’s the point of just two of us leaving?”

“It would get you out of danger, is what,” Kun says, crossing his arms. “What’s the point of Mark forewarning us about this if we don’t do anything about it?”

“We will do something about it!” Yangyang says, crossing his arms and drawing himself up in front of his brother. “We’ll hide with you!”

“You have no reason to be here, Yangyang. If something goes wrong, it’s safer for you to be as far away as possible.”

“If something goes wrong, it’s better if I’m with all of you. What would I be able to do on my own?”

The two of them stare each other down for a few seconds, and Mark doesn’t need foresight to tell that Kun is going to give in, too soft for his own good.

He sighs, looking at Yangyang with raised brows. “At least hide in a different room, or something.”

“Actually, if we’re hiding, it makes more sense for him to be with us,” Doyoung says, assessing the room. “I can manipulate an illusion to keep us hidden as best I can, but I can’t protect him with one if he’s separate to us. If SM storms the hideout, he wouldn’t have a chance on his own.”

Yangyang is wearing a triumphant smile. “See. It’s safer to stay with you.”

Kun sighs. “That’s not true, but I know I couldn’t make you leave even if I tried.”

“Jeno?” Jaemin tries. “Won’t you go?”

“No,” Jeno says, firm. “Not while our friends need us.”

The alarm bells in Mark’s head are so sudden that he gasps. “They’re coming now! Shit!” he says, instantly panicking, and everyone swivels back to look at him.

“What?” Jaemin asks, pale.

Doyoung grabs Kun in one hand and Jeno in the other, quickly dragging them back against the closest wall. “Get over here, now! Stay close to the wall!”

Yangyang helps Mark move, pulling him up and dragging him to the wall with them. Something must’ve just changed at the labs for them to have so much less time than he’d thought, now he can sense Renjun coming here imminently. He places his palms against the wall, trying to steady himself against it and calm his breathing. His heart is suddenly racing, ahead of time; no one’s here yet, but his emotions always know more than he does. Doyoung is focusing on his fingers, and then he says,

“We’re hidden now. Visually and audibly to an extent, but stay still and quiet if you can.”

Beside Mark, Jaemin nods, swallowing.

All he can hear is his heartbeat in his ears, waiting for them. It feels like it’s happening, but it’s not, not yet. He hates when things get muddled like this. There’s this tension in his chest that he can’t name yet—can’t tell why it feels so heavy, so frightening. Something bad is about to happen.

Then they’re there, standing in the middle of the room, right where Taeyong had last left with Hendery and Dejun. Taeil is on one side, Renjun on the other, and Taeyong releases their hands when they arrive, then stands still. He hears Jaemin’s sharp intake of breath beside him as Renjun turns his head, looking around the room.

“Where is this?” he asks Taeyong.

“The old Handong University sports building,” he answers promptly. Taeil is looking around too, but not to inspect the room—he’s scanning for people. For them. It sends a chill down his spine to see Taeil looking so empty—he’s one of the warmest people Mark knows, and somehow SM have made him into this shell of himself.

“You’ve been hiding here the whole time?” Renjun speaks like he’s reading from a script, like he’s a shadow of the friend Mark knows.

“Yes.”

“Who else has been here with you?”

“Everyone from the labs, plus four others.”

“How many did you leave behind today?”

“Six.”

“So where are they?”

Taeyong is silent, and Renjun looks at him again, meeting his eyes in a hard glare. “Where are they, Taeyong? The room is empty.”

“I don’t know.”

Mark chances a look over at Jaemin, who seems to be watching the exchange, stunned. He can’t tear his eyes away from Renjun, trembling slightly against the wall. Mark gets it, he does. But they need Jaemin to focus, right now.

“Where did you leave them?”

“Here.”

“So where do you think they’ve gone?”

He reaches out and shakes Jaemin’s shoulder, whose head snaps around to look at Mark.

 _Renjun_ , he mouths, tapping the side of Jaemin’s head.

Jaemin shakes himself out of it, nodding back and looking down at Renjun’s feet. After a few seconds, his gaze goes unfocused, like it tends to when he’s reaching out to someone’s mind.

“I think Mark might have seen this coming,” Taeyong is saying, though the words are coming out like gravel, reluctantly taken from his mouth. “So they’ve run, or they’re hiding.”

Renjun raises a hand to bat by his own ear, like there’s a fly hovering there. Then he looks around sharply.

“They’re here,” he murmurs, narrowing his eyes at the room. Mark’s heart beats louder when his eyes skim over their hiding place. “Jaemin is certainly here. Doyoung is hiding them, I assume. Taeyong, bring Jisung and Jaehyun here. Don’t touch Jisung’s hand.”

Taeyong disappears without a word. Renjun twitches, tensing up—and it looks like their plan might actually be working, with Renjun looking more uncomfortable by the second. Mark rests a hand on Jaemin’s arm, a silent encouragement, because it looks like they could really get through to Renjun like this.

“Can you sense them?” Renjun asks Taeil, who’s paused in his turning, body partially angled in their direction.

“They have the power working in the building. It’s hard to pick out the human energy,” Taeil says, turning his head the other way.

Renjun sighs, eyebrows furrowed. “It’s better for you to come out,” he says, louder, addressing the room. “Come quietly, so they don’t have to hurt you.” His voice echoes around the room, and the six of them stay still.

Jaemin’s hands are balled tight, skin white, his mouth turned down. He’s struggling, and they need to buy him time to work through this.

“Doyoung,” he whispers, leaning over Jaemin to come in close, trying to trust his illusion even though it feels wrong to make any noise. “Will you cover us if we move around the room?”

Doyoung looks at him, questioning, but they have no time to discuss it. “Stick to the walls,” he whispers back.

Yangyang, already on board with his plan, starts edging to the left as Mark starts moving to the right, cautious not to brush the scrap pile in the corner as he passes. Kun tries to reach out for Yangyang as he passes him, but Yangyang pays him no mind, shuffling further around the room as Mark steps along the wall opposite him.

Taeyong reappearing in the room with other two boys startles him, and he stops to catch his breath, standing closer to the group now. He can see Jaemin tip his head back against the wall to stare at Jisung, completely thrown from his task—Mark is grateful to see Kun take his arm, whispering something in his ear.

“Thank you, Taeyong” Renjun says, voice steady again. “You should come out, now, unless you want to stand here and wait for the building to crumble around you.”

Mark glances back over to the others. Jaemin is back in his headspace again, and Doyoung and Jeno are leaning close together, whispering fast about something. On the other side of the room, Yangyang is looking over the enemy gathering with fire in his eyes, like he has an awful, terrible idea. Mark can’t help but despair that if only his ability had worked a little faster, given them some more time to plan, they might have more of an advantage here, because he has no idea what the fuck he’s doing. He’s so afraid that someone is about to get hurt.

“Last chance,” Jaehyun warns, and his voice is lower than Mark expected, sends chills through him. He’s sporting awful burns on his front that look like Donghyuck’s work, but he’s standing there as calm as anything.

“Alright,” Renjun says, almost resigned. “Jisung, let’s start taking the walls down.”

But Jisung stays in place, a little frown on his face under too-long hair. He’s staring at the floor, the same glazed look in his eyes that people on the receiving end of Jaemin’s reach tend to get.

 _Yes._ If there’s anyone Jaemin can get through to, surely it’s his brother.

“Jisung?” Renjun questions, uncomprehending. He goes to walk in front of him, and Mark’s brief hope comes to a grinding halt—Renjun’s ability could undo any of Jaemin’s progress in a second.

The others seem to have the same realisation. Like Renjun’s footstep had been a trigger, the room suddenly springs into momentum. Jeno, now wielding a piece of scrap metal that’s quickly forming into a thin, smooth pole, is racing into the middle of the room, weapon raised high. Everyone but Jisung turns to face the noise of his footsteps, but Doyoung’s illusion must still be giving him visual cover, because no one stops him when he swings the pole right at Taeil’s head, colliding with a God-awful clang. The impact sends Taeil flying sidewards, skidding along the floor to a dead stop.

Jeno looks at Taeil for a second, expecting him to get up, but he doesn’t. His chest rises, alive but unconscious, so Jeno turns to face the rest of the group, who look right back at him. He takes a valiant swing at Jaehyun, but is less successful this time as the pole goes right through him and spins out of his grasp. Jaehyun reaches out to grasp Jeno by the throat, pushing him back, back, until he’s up against the nearest wall. Fortunately, it happens to be the wall where Yangyang is still hidden only a few feet away from them. He leaps into the fight by launching himself onto Jaehyun’s back, using the surprise momentum to yank him sideways, stumbling away from Jeno. The two of them making a rattling collision with Chenle’s knife cupboard in the corner, then tumble to the floor.

“Taeyong,” Renjun says, quickly assessing the situation. “Take Jeno and his friend back to the labs, then come back here.”

Taeyong disappears, only to reappear on the wrong side of the room, reaching for something that isn’t there. Mark stares for a second, and Taeyong looks around, also confused. Then Mark looks to Doyoung, only to see he’s ducked behind a stack of chairs, his hands tense, fingers twitching. He must have sacrificed his own protective illusion to create a false vision for Taeyong, and Mark suddenly admires Doyoung a thousand times more for his foresight to distract Taeyong, the most important player in this game. He who controls Taeyong can sway the outcome, and SM had known that from the start.

Kun, anxiously watching Yangyang and Jeno wrestle with Jaehyun on the floor, seems to finally tear himself away from the wall to run for Renjun. It makes sense—with everyone else distracted, all Kun needs to do is keep away from Renjun’s gaze, put him on the floor or get a hand over his mouth. What Kun doesn’t account for is the two years of combat training Renjun has done under SM—as soon as Kun’s hands are on his shoulders, the boy twists, grabbing Kun around the waist and throwing him onto the floor. He lands on his back, hard, and Renjun punches him in the face with a crack, then brings a foot down hard on his knee.

Kun cries out in pain, and the scream rips through Mark. Seeing Renjun deliberately hurt someone is so unimaginable that he has to look away, his throat feeling like acid.

Renjun looks down at Kun, gaze empty, then faces Jisung again. “Jisung!” he says, loud and pointed.

Jisung doesn’t look at him, but he does turn his attention to Kun, blinking slowly. In his peripheral, Mark can see Jaemin shaking his head.

“Jisung, don’t,” he says, and Renjun’s head snaps up towards the sound of his voice. “Jisung!”

Jisung takes a step towards Kun like he’s in a daze, hand reaching out. Renjun watches.

Kun grips at Jisung’s ankle, trying to push him away, raising an arm over his face and trying to escape, but Renjun keeps his foot pressed down on Kun’s injured leg. “No, no, please don’t—"

“Jisung!” Jaemin screams again, and the sound is so desperate it rocks Mark through and through. Jisung freezes, hand hovering inches over Kun’s face, and he blinks again. Straightens up.

Looking around the room, he meets Jaemin’s eyes, then looks back down at Kun.

“Oh my God,” Jaemin whispers, voice shaking. “Oh, Kun, Hyung—it’s you. You did it.”

Mark zones in on Kun’s hand, wrapped around Jisung’s ankle, touching bare skin. _Of course._ He wants to ram his head into a wall for his own stupidity. Kun, who had healed Jungwoo’s hangover after they’d found liquor in the office locker; Kun, who had fast-tracked Chenle’s food poisoning when Jaemin had tried cooking his birthday meal; Kun, who always sooths Dejun back to sleep after his night terrors. If SM has used drugs as the basis of their mind alteration, something to keep them numb and obedient, Kun could flush it out of them in seconds.

“Hyung?” Jisung says, looking up at Jaemin, the syllable cracked and hoarse. Jaemin falls to his knees, tears streaming down his face as he nods.

“Y-you’re okay. It’s me. Come here, Jisung.”

Amazingly, Jisung steps away from Kun, walking towards Jaemin. Mark tears his eyes away to see Renjun, watching on in utter confusion, glancing down at Kun. Beyond him, Jeno is lying unconscious, and Jaehyun is moving across the room, throwing punches into an empty illusion of some sort as Taeyong stands stock still. Doyoung is stepping out from behind the chairs, gaping at Kun with round eyes.

“Kun, hold Renjun,” he says. “Help him too. Don’t look into his eyes.”

Kun is only just realising what he’s done, and as he sits up Renjun starts to back away from him.

“No,” he says, but he sounds conflicted. “Don’t.”

Jaehyun turns to see what’s happening too late—Renjun is a good fighter, but all it takes is Kun limping forwards to grasp his wrist, and he’s quickly relaxing, like he’d been ready for this all along. His blown pupils resize, and his stance loosens, and he looks around the room, confused—his expression turns to horror when he sees Jeno on the floor, Jaemin on the other side of the room, and then Jaehyun, watching them with conflict written into his face.

“Renjun,” Mark says, finally finding his voice and stepping away from the wall. “We need to help Jaehyun too.”

Renjun stares at him like he’s seen a ghost. Then he looks to Jaehyun, and his voice shakes when he says,

“Jaehyun, come here.”

Jaehyun walks over to him without question. Kun takes one of his hands in his, and they all watch on as Jaehyun’s expression clears, looking around the room with fresh eyes.

“Good,” Mark says, walking closer to Renjun with his hands out in front of him, like he’s approaching a scared animal. “Now Taeyong. He needs to take Kun to help the others, too.”

Renjun’s hands are shaking, his face distraught, but he turns to do as Mark says. “Taeyong—I have no power over you.”

The second the sentence is out of his mouth, Taeyong is at Kun’s side, taking his arm. The two of them disappear, and Renjun sags against Mark, a broken sob leaving his mouth.

“Oh, Junnie. You’ve done so well,” he tells him, hugging Renjun’s frame against him. “It’s okay. You’re safe now.”

Kun is the thing. He can tell it now, too—Kun is going to save them.

So why is the dread only growing in his gut?

He scans the room. Jaehyun falters to his knees at Mark’s side, gasping for breath like he’s about to start hyperventilating. Jisung is kneeling in front of Jaemin, hands pulled tightly under his armpits, and Jaemin is cradling his face and talking to him in quiet, stuttering breaths. Doyoung is running over to Jeno’s side, checking his pulse before looking up to meet Mark’s eyes.

“He’s okay. Where’s Yangyang?”

“Oh, God,” Jaehyun says, at the same time as Mark’s heart skips a beat, and he knows with a certainty that this is what’s wrong. _Where is Yangyang?_

He releases Renjun absently, letting instinct take him; starts running across the room, almost colliding with Taeyong when he reappears to lower Jungwoo and Dejun to the floor. He barely glances at them before disappearing again, and Mark steps right past an unconscious Dejun, headed to where Chenle’s knife cupboard has tipped over in the corner. He pushes it aside as best he can, Doyoung helping him drag it away, and there, hidden between the cupboard and the discarded sports mats, Yangyang is slumped against the wall.

“Yangyang?” Doyoung says, tone pitched. He kneels quickly, going to shake his arm. “You okay?”

Yangyang shifts with the movement, his head lolling and jacket moving slightly, and then Mark sees it; the red stain on his white shirt, wet and growing fast. Yangyang’s nose is busted, blood dripping down his mouth and onto his shirt, but this stain is bigger and much more deadly than a nosebleed. Mark can finally identify the heavy tension in his chest.

“Oh my God,” he mutters, taking the hem of Yangyang’s shirt and pulling it up gently.

“We got you, you’re okay,” Doyoung is saying, but they’re both looking at his sternum, sticky and bleeding from a gaping wound. Yangyang whines, a short, breathy thing, and his leg moves, revealing the bloody knife abandoned beside it.

“Shit,” Mark gasps, pressing Yangyang’s shirt back against the three awful stab wounds in his middle. Doyoung is pulling his sweater over his head and balling it up in his hands, and Mark is trying to apply pressure, but he can smell the blood—there’s so much of it he feels dizzy. Doyoung is easing the sweater over the wounds, but Mark has this horrible feeling that they’re too late.

Yangyang groans, face screwing up as he puts weak hands over Mark’s on the sweater. “Hurts.”

“I know,” he says, voice raw, pain in his own chest blossoming. “I’m sorry.”

There’s the sound of feet against the floor, and Ten’s voice crying out, “Yangyang?”

Ten takes Doyoung’s place by his side in a second, hands coming over Mark’s, wild eyes darting to him. “What happened?”

Silent tears are running down Yangyang’s face, and his breathing is becoming shallow and quick.

“I’m sorry,” Jaehyun says from the other side of the room, voice broken. “I’m so sorry. I think it was me.”

Ten looks over at him, and his knee nudges the bloody knife. He looks down at it, and then at Doyoung’s grey sweater, which is starting to stain dark around the sides. “Oh, God,” he says, putting his hands over Mark’s and pressing down hard. “Baby, can you hear me? Look at me, baby.”

Yangyang does. He looks up, breathing quick and panicked, his eyes wet, and says something in Chinese. Mark has been learning basic Chinese from Yangyang and Dejun, and he’s not very good, but he understands this much: _I don’t want to die._

“You won’t, you’re not,” Ten says in short English, bringing one bloody hand up to support Yangyang’s cheek. He whips his head around to look at the room, and says in a harsher voice, “Where the hell is Kun?”

Mark looks back, too. Chenle is now in the room, crouching by Jisung, along with an exhausted Yuta on the floor. Sicheng is also here, watching them with heavy eyes, and then Taeyong appears in front of him, holding Hendery and a very confused Lucas.

“Taeyong!” he shouts, but Taeyong is too fast, is gone before Mark can finish the word. He looks back to Yangyang, his chest heaving under Mark’s hands, his neck and chin and chest stained with his own blood.

Then Taeyong is back again, holding Sungchan, and a boy who must be Shotaro. “What?” he asks, spinning to find Mark.

“Get Kun!” he shouts, and Taeyong sees the blood, and disappears.

He ignores everything in him that already knows Yangyang will die. He can’t die. It doesn’t make any sense—they should have won. He would have known that something like this would happen, and he could’ve warned them. Why didn’t he know? Is his ability this useless?

Yangyang coughs, hard and rattling, and Mark feels warm blood splatter his neck.

“Just hold on, baby, your brother is coming,” Ten is saying, pressing his lips to the side of Yangyang’s head, trying to hold and reassure him like they aren’t both covered in way too much of his blood.

Footsteps again, staggering this time, Kun being supported by Taeyong as he drops to Yangyang’s side. Mark shuffles up closer to the wall and pulls the sweater away, Kun’s fumbling hands reaching under Yangyang’s soaked shirt, stammering Chinese falling from his mouth.

Yangyang sobs loudly when Kun gets his fingertips directly on the wound. Kun says something more in shaking Chinese, _you’re fine, you’re okay,_ then looks at Mark, can barely get his words out in Korean.

“W-what did this? What weapon?”

He jerks his head towards the knife at Ten’s side. “Knife.”

They both look at it. It isn’t comforting. The blade is long and curved and soaked up to the hilt. Kun looks like he’s about to pass out, and his hands are trembling, and he’s already spent his energy healing several others, judging by the dazed Johnny beside an unconscious Donghyuck further in the room. Yangyang is so very deeply wounded, already so far gone. He’s going to die here, and Mark hates his ability, his stupid fucking useless foresight that couldn’t even tell him this in time.

“You’re going to be okay,” Ten is saying, again and again. Mark wonders if he really believes it.

Yangyang looks up at Ten, and his breathing skips once, then again. Then he stops moving completely, body lax against the wall, head lolling into Ten’s bloody hand. His gaze goes vacant. His breathing stops.

The wounds look unchanged under Kun’s hands, blood still leaking out. Kun only sobs once and presses his hands harder into his skin, desperate to use his ability the one time it matters. Mark doesn’t have the heart to pull his hands away.

“Baby,” Ten murmurs, knocking his head against Yangyang’s. “Come on, don’t do this.”

Kun leans down, shaking all over, and buries his face into Yangyang’s shoulder. The awful sob he lets out into the bloody clothing rakes through Mark like a physical pain.

Mark reaches over to gently push Yangyang’s eyelids closed. Ten closes his eyes too, pressing a kiss to the side of Yangyang’s head. There’s the sound of gentle crying from close by—Doyoung is sat near them, cheeks streaked, eyes red. Chenle, too, has his hands over his mouth. All eyes in the room are on them.

Mark hears Jaehyun’s hands hit the floor, a cry leaving him. “I—I—” he stammers, and Sungchan is at his side, hands on his shoulders. “I’m—I’m so—”

Ten turns his head, eyes blazing. He gently tips Yangyang’s head back so it rests against the wall, briefly touches Kun’s back in solidarity. Then he stands, his eyes trained on Jaehyun.

“Ten,” Mark says, sensing danger rising fast. “It wasn’t his fault.”

Ten doesn’t hear him. Johnny tries to reach for him as he passes, but Ten doesn’t spare him a glance. Sungchan rises to his feet, facing Ten, stepping protectively in front of his brother.

“Ten,” he says, voice wavering. “I’m so sorry.”

Taeyong steps into Ten’s path, gripping his arms and looking into his eyes. “Ten. We’re not doing this,” he says, firm.

“Fuck you,” Ten hisses, pushing Taeyong away so hard he stumbles back against the floor. “He killed him!”

“It wasn’t him!” Sungchan shouts, and a guttural snarl leaves Ten’s throat, harsh and ripping and immediately preceding his transformation into a big, toothy tiger.

Mark has this feeling, then. Something rooted in his ability, hitting him too fast, too early, disorienting and completely contrary to the current circumstances.

It’s like he’s really happy.

“Ten!” Yuta shouts, sharp, but Ten is leaping for Jaehyun. Sungchan flings an arm out, shooting one of his concentrated quakes at Ten, who goes skidding backwards.

“Please!” Sungchan is shouting, hand outstretched in front of him. “Don’t! It isn’t his fault!”

Jaehyun stays on his knees behind Sungchan, staring at Yangyang. His face is blank and resigned, like’s ready to take whatever Ten can give.

Mark looks at Yangyang too. Kun is still sobbing into his shoulder, unknowing or uncaring about Ten’s revenge on Jaehyun, but his hands have slipped down from the wounds to grip at his back, holding his body close. Mark reaches out to wipe some of the blood away from his stomach with his hands, and finds it doesn’t come pouring out of his injuries so fast anymore.

“Renjun—” Jaemin says, an urgent plea for intervention in his voice.

Renjun just shakes his head, watching Ten with heavy eyes. “I’m sorry.”

Ten leaps again, and this time he’s stopped by one of Yuta’s shields. It only lasts for a few seconds as Ten claws at it, tearing the strong silver shine to shreds, and the shield fades away as Yuta falters and collapses against the floor. Sungchan hits Ten with a quake again, and the whole room shakes with the force of it, but so does Sungchan. He’s too exhausted to keep this up for much longer, his hand wavering in front of him.

Mark’s smiling now—he just can’t help it, wonders if this is a weird sort of response to grief or if he’s really getting something here. He looks down at Yangyang again, and he could swear the stab wounds look smaller than before. Actually, if he watches them instead of the fight rapidly developing in the middle of the room, it looks like his injuries really are shrinking—they’re barely bleeding at all anymore.

“Kun,” he says, over the noise of Ten growling and the others shouting. “Hyung, are you doing that?”

Kun sits up to look at him, his face smeared with tears and blood, completely uncomprehending. Then he looks down at Yangyang’s injuries, hands hovering over skin, but not touching.

“N-no,” he says, looking back up at Mark.

Mark laughs, actually laughs, pure delight and relief hitting him hard, and Kun is staring. “Oh, Yangyang,” he says, brushing his hair back from his face. “You are wonderful.”

Johnny is pushing himself to shaky feet, going to grab Ten from behind as he swipes for an exhausted Sungchan and the defeated Jaehyun. Ten yowls, scratches at Johnny and tries to twist out of his grip, and Mark leans in to give Yangyang a hug.

“Oh, shut up, Ten-hyung,” he calls over the noise, and it makes the whole room stop and turn to him. Even Ten stops, ripping himself free of Johnny’s grip and landing on all fours, glaring over at Mark with his dark, piercing tiger’s gaze.

Mark leans out of the hug to run a hand over the sticky skin of Yangyang’s torso—all three wounds are completely gone, leaving only smooth skin behind. “It’s time to wake up now, Yangyang,” he says. “You’ve given everyone enough of a scare.”

For a few moments, the room is completely still, and Kun is staring at him with wet eyes, and Mark knows he looks like a crazy person. But it’s okay. The rest of them will catch up in a minute.

In his arms, Yangyang stirs like he’s waking up from an unexpected nap. Shifts against him, then lifts his head, eyes lidded and looking around in confusion.

Ten is bounding over, shifting back into human form halfway across the room and skidding down to his knees. “Oh my God,” he says, putting his palm over Yangyang’s chest, crooked fingers searching for a heartbeat, the other to his cheek, bringing him around to face him. “You—you’re alive?”

Kun sits there, stunned, holding one of Yangyang’s hands in his. Yangyang looks at Ten, then at Kun, then down at the thick blood staining his arms and neck and stomach. He rakes his fingers across the skin of his stomach, wound free, and Ten slides his hand down to join him there, looking for the cause of death. Completely gone.

Yangyang is alive.

“Gē?” Yangyang says, voice small, looking up at Kun. He spits a little blood onto the floor. “What happened?”

Kun gapes, tears dropping down his cheeks silently, and he shakes his head, speechless. He pulls Yangyang forwards into a tight hug, wrapping his arms tight around him.

“It was you,” Mark says, finally resting back on his haunches. “It’s your ability. You came back from the dead.”

Yangyang looks at Mark, letting Ten take his other hand and bury his nose into his hair. “I died?” he whispers.

“Yes,” he answers, meeting his gaze straight on. “But you’re okay now.” He looks out at the room, to their injured troops and long-lost friends, all looking back at him. They’re all here. They did it.

“We’re all going to be okay,” he says, and there it is: a rare certainty, a piece of precious immovable knowledge his ability sometimes deems to lend him. This is something he knows for sure. “I promise.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CONTENT WARNING: the temporary character death tag applies to this chapter and it shows the death of one of the 23 boys. he comes back by the end of the chapter but there's injury + blood and brief grief so you know... maybe stop at the bit after taeyong teleports kun if you want to avoid that! you should be able to pick up again at the next chapter as it's all healing + recovery focused after this :)
> 
> thank you as always for reading + leaving kudos and comments!!


	6. Yuta

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Recap of abilities:  
> Taeyong: Teleportation  
> Jungwoo: Superspeed  
> Sungchan: Vibrations/quakes  
> Hendery: Technopath  
> Ten: Cat shapeshifting  
> Jeno: Material manipulation  
> Jaemin: Memory manipulation/exploration  
> Dejun: Weather creation/manipulation  
> Donghyuck: Explosions  
> Chenle: Superhuman combat abilities  
> Mark: Foresight  
> Kun: Healing  
> Doyoung: Illusions  
> Jaehyun: Density manipulation  
> Sicheng: Empath/mood manipulation  
> Lucas: Unbreakable body  
> Johnny: Superstrength  
> Yuta: Force fields  
> Taeil: Energy manipulation  
> Renjun: Compulsion - mind/body control  
> Jisung: Disintegration  
> Yangyang: Revival ;)

After Yangyang comes back from the dead, Mark pronounces them safe. Yuta takes that as express permission to lie back down on the floor and pass out, like he’s been wanting to since holding up the fragments of a ten ton basement over himself and Chenle. That feels like a lifetime ago, now.

When he comes to again, it’s because Johnny is patting his cheek firmly, looming over him on the floor.

“Hey, come on, buddy. You okay? What do you need?”

Yuta cracks open his eyelids slightly to look up at him. “My name is Yuta. I would’ve said hi earlier, but you were trying to kill me then.”

Johnny laughs, somehow, and Yuta respects him for it. “Sorry about that. Hi, Yuta, it’s nice to meet you. You’re okay?”

Yuta waves his hand. “Peachy.”

Johnny grabs his hand to help him sit up, and Yuta takes a proper look around the room. They’ve got so many injured people that the sports hall looks more like a battlefield—Johnny himself is battered all over, skin looking a painful shade of burned, but he’s more preoccupied with glancing anxiously over at Donghyuck beside them. Kun is sitting next to him, his hands on Donghyuck’s ribs, eyes shut. He’s still sporting dried tears on his face, and Yangyang’s blood is seeping from his hands onto Donghyuck’s clothes. His broken leg sticks out awkwardly next to him, because Kun has always had a harder time healing himself than other people; Donghyuck and Taeil will probably get priority treatment for their injuries, but everyone else will have lick their wounds the old-fashioned way, giving Kun enough time and rest to focus on healing his own leg.

He sees the back end of Ten supporting Yangyang through the sports hall doors. He seems shaky on his feet—the shock of dying probably does that to you— but other than that, positively fully healed. His wounds are gone, his broken nose fixed—Yuta had watched his split lip close up and seal completely, right before he’d woken up. How ironic that Kun struggles to heal his own wounds, but Yangyang can bounce back from death itself. He supposes if anyone could, it would be Yangyang.

He stares at the pool of blood that’s been left behind in the corner. Yangyang is alive despite everything, but it was the narrowest of misses, and one that will probably haunt the group for a while. They’ll deal with that later.

In the here and now, Hendery comes bounding over to them, eyes bright and alert. “Johnny! Hey man, nice to meet you at last! I need you to give me your shirt.”

Johnny blinks up at him. When he turns his head, Yuta notices his hair is long at the back, falling down into a low ponytail. “Uh, hey man. What for?”

“You’re tagged,” Hendery explains brightly. “All of you. Renjun’s watch, Taeil’s waistband, Sicheng’s earring. They put Jaehyun’s under his skin, the poor guy.” He holds a short pocketknife up, blood staining the tip. “I need to cut the tag out of your collar, or you need to give me your shirt.”

“Tagged?” Yuta asks, sharp. “Trackers?”

“Yup,” Hendery says, popping the word. “Don’t worry, they’re really simple. I disarmed Renjun’s and Sicheng’s without even realising it earlier, and I’m pretty sure I’ve been blocking the signals the whole time anyway. Going to examine them to make sure, then destroy them. SM really want to get their hands on us, huh?”

Yuta raises an eyebrow. “You could say that, yes.”

Johnny kneels, giving Hendery easy access to his collar, and he quickly cuts out a tiny little chip from the back. Balances it on the tip of his finger and he grins down at it like it’s his favourite birthday gift. “Brilliant. Yuta, will you tell Doyoung that I’ll be back to help with the clean-up once I’m done with these? I don’t want him to think I’m skipping out.”

“That is part of the clean-up,” Yuta says, shooing him away. “Go on. Come back and reassure me that SM aren’t going to swarm down on us once you’re done.”

“Okidokey!” Hendery grins, turning to run out of the sports hall. He slows down halfway to pat Renjun on the shoulder as he passes, who’s leaning against Jaemin with a vacant look in his eyes—he jolts when Hendery touches him, but Hendery only grins right back. “Hey, no hard feelings, man. We did it!”

Hendery practically skips out of the room, and Renjun stares after him as he goes. Jaemin just pulls Renjun further into his side, sporting a vague smile, sat knee to knee with Jisung. Jisung is looking a lot more present than Renjun is, but in a paranoid sort of way; repeatedly glancing over his shoulder at every movement, too jumpy to settle.

Yuta brings his attention back to Donghyuck when he hears a smart snap, and Donghyuck takes in a sudden breath of air. He opens his eyes, staring up at the ceiling for a few seconds until he finds Kun’s face above him.

“Hey,” Kun says, shaky, trying for a smile. “Ribs feel okay?”

Donghyuck takes a few more breaths in, then brings a hand up to feel along his previously-broken ribs. “Oh, yeah,” he says, sitting up in one swift movement. “Amazing, thank you. Wow. You’re a life-saver, seriously.” He turns his head, sees Johnny sitting on the other side of him, and jolts slightly. “You’re here! And you’re good now?”

“I’m good,” Johnny confirms, hands hovering at his sides like he wants to hug Donghyuck but knows he can’t. “You good too?”

“Much better now,” Donghyuck grins, then opens his arms. “Come here, already.”

Johnny leans in to give him the most delicate hug possible. “Hyuck, I’m so sorry—” he starts, but Donghyuck cuts him off with a light hit to the arm.

“Don’t even do that. I’m just glad you’re here, and that you’re sane again. It’s okay. I would never blame you.” He grips him harder for a moment, then groans, and Johnny quickly untangles himself from his grasp.

“Take it slow,” Kun says. “You’ll still be sore.”

“Right, sorry,” Donghyuck mutters, holding his side gingerly with one hand. “What did I miss? We did it, right?”

“We did it,” Yuta says, looking at Kun. “Not without a few stumbling blocks.”

“Yangyang died,” Kun rasps, and Donghyuck almost snaps his neck looking around at him.

“What?”

“But then he was alive again,” Johnny says quickly. “I don’t really understand what happened, to be honest. But he’s okay now.”

Chenle jogs over to them then, armed with bandages and painkillers, kneeling beside Kun. “Yangyang manifested a power,” he tells Donghyuck. “Self-revival.”

“Holy hell,” Donghyuck says, hand on his chest. “I think I just had a heart attack. Why didn’t you tell me the full story?” he demands of Kun, but his whole stance softens to look at him. “God, why are you here healing me instead of with him?”

“I couldn’t walk him to the showers,” Kun says, and he sounds half-hysterical with it. “And Johnny and Taeyong were worried about your condition, and I urgently needed to look at Taeil’s leg, so here I am! You only just managed to avoid a punctured lung, by the way.”

“And now it’s time for you to rest, gē,” Chenle says, pushing at Kun’s shoulders gently, encouraging him to lie down. “You’ve done enough. Let me see your leg. Do you think it’s broken?”

“Pretty sure,” Kun sniffs, letting Chenle push him down. “My kneecap is shattered, too.”

“Taeyong said he would take you to a hospital once he’s on his feet again—”

“No,” Kun interrupts. “I can heal this in a few weeks. I just need something to support it with in the meantime. We have a splint in the supplies room.”

“You really should—” Yuta starts, but Kun isn’t having any of it.

“I can’t go, they’ll want me to stay overnight, they’ll take my details, and we can’t have that now. I’ve got this. I want to stay here anyway, where I can see Yangyang.”

He can’t fault him for that. Chenle runs to get the splint along with more spare medical supplies, and comes back to carefully wrap up Kun’s leg, talking to him in a gentle voice as he does so. Then he gives Yuta a once over—he’s fine, really—and hugs Johnny hard before giving him a burn salve. He moves on to shake Dejun awake, laid out several meters away from them, and Donghyuck and Johnny take off to the bathrooms to apply the salve.

On the other side of the room, Taeil is sitting up with Mark’s support, holding one of his hands—syphoning a bit of energy from him, probably. Several bloodied wipes lay at Mark’s side, where he’d tried to wipe the worst of Yangyang’s blood off his hands, then taken care of the remains of Taeil’s varied injuries on his own. Kun must’ve only healed his leg most of the way, conserving the last of his energy for Donghyuck’s ribs, because he’s still got some nasty bite marks up his shin.

Jaemin, Jisung, Renjun and Sicheng are all sat around the unconscious Jeno, with Jeno’s head in Renjun’s lap as Jaemin wipes away his stray tears. Chenle encourages Dejun to wobble over and sit beside them so that someone can keep an eye on him too, and then he hovers by that group for a few minutes more, as if they might suddenly disappear again if he looks away. Lucas is sat beside Jungwoo, watching over him too, and Sungchan and Jaehyun sit together not far away, talking quietly.

Doyoung is crouching over Taeyong, who is laid out on his back in the middle of everyone. He’s moving his hands enough that Yuta knows he’s awake, just exhausted from the amount of trips he had to take so rapidly tonight. Doyoung stands up straight again to meet Yuta’s eye, and reluctantly leaves Taeyong’s side to jog over to him.

“Hey,” he says, patting his arm and glancing at the sleeping Kun beside him. “You okay?”

“Fantastic. You need some help?”

Doyoung gives him an inspecting eye, like he can tell Yuta is about to pass out again at any minute, but doesn’t challenge him on it. “Taeyong wants you to talk to Shotaro. Apparently he doesn’t speak Korean.”

He nods his head towards the corner of the room, behind Yuta, who turns to see the boy in question sat there on his own. He has his knees pulled up to his chest, arms wrapped around them, nervously looking around the room. The poor kid must be confused—trust Taeyong to think about something like that right now.

“Alright.” He holds a hand up to Doyoung, wiggling his fingers expectantly, and Doyoung grasps it to pull him up. He still sways on his feet for a moment, gripping Doyoung’s arms to steady himself.

“I’m going to see what food we have. Everyone needs some energy right now,” Doyoung says, eyeing him up and keeping a steady hand on his elbow as they walk over to Shotaro.

“What we all need is sleep,” he says. “Give everyone an energy bar and tell them to catch a solid twelve hours. Whoever isn’t about to collapse on their feet can stay up overnight to keep an eye Jeno and Jungwoo.”

Shotaro looks up at them nervously as they approach. There’s a crackling noise, and the walls around them seem to flicker.

“Hello,” he says in Japanese, pulling himself away from Doyoung for the last few steps. “I’m here to talk to you, if that’s okay.”

Shotaro seems surprised to hear him speak his own tongue, releasing his knees to brace his hands on the floor. The crackling fades, and the air settles. “Oh. Hello.”

Yuta waves Doyoung away behind him, then sits down opposite Shotaro, mirroring his position by placing his palms against the floor. “Are you okay? Hurt anywhere?”

Shotaro shakes his head. “I’m fine. Just tired.”

He smiles. “Me too. We have a bedroom upstairs, if you’d like to go and get some sleep.”

Shotaro shifts forwards again, latching his hands together. “Um, I was actually wondering—who are you people?”

He tilts his head. “Good question. I’m guessing you weren’t able to talk to the others much in the labs?”

Shotaro shakes his head. “You’re the only other Japanese person I’ve met who has an ability. You’re the one with the shields, right?”

“That’s me. You’re the first Japanese powered person I’ve met too, so it’s nice to meet you. I’m Yuta, and these are all the other guys we know of with abilities.” He gestures to the hall at large, somewhat bleak as people sit around nursing wounds in little groups. “We’re usually a bit more impressive than this.”

Shotaro gives him a small smile and tentative bow, rubbing his hands down his shins. “It’s nice to meet you. I’m Shotaro. Thank you for getting us out of SM.”

“You’re welcome. I’m glad we could get you out in one piece. If you want to stay with us, we can make sure you stay safe from SM, stay hidden here. We have clothes, food, running water. You’re welcome to join the gang. But if you’d rather leave, that’s okay too. We can have Jaemin remove the building from your memory, and Taeyong will drop you off somewhere tomorrow.”

Shotaro looks at the floor, then glances back up at Yuta. “Are you sure it’s safe here?”

Yuta looks at him for a long moment. For all his young, innocent features, he thinks Shotaro might have seen more than he should’ve. “How about we go and find out?”

He stands, brushing his clothes down, and holds a hand out to Shotaro. Shotaro looks at him, then hesitantly takes his hand, and Yuta pulls him to his feet. They walk across the hall together past the huddled groups, though people seem to be filtering out now. Doyoung accosts them at the door, shoving an apple into his hand, a peach into Shotaro’s.

“Eat,” he says firmly, gesturing an eating movement for Shotaro, like he’s never seen a peach before or something. “Then sleep for as long as you need. Mark, Chenle and I are going to stay up tonight.”

Yuta offers him a half-salute in understanding, takes a big bite out of the apple, and leads Shotaro down the hallway. They reach the empty kitchen, then pass by the bathrooms right as Yangyang and Ten are emerging, both now in clean clothes. A glimpse inside the bathroom before the door swings shut tells him the bloody clothing has been discarded on the tiled floor.

“You doing alright?” he asks them, pausing at the stairwell floor with Shotaro, who’s making quick work of the peach.

“Fine,” Yangyang says, bright-eyed and standing just fine on his own. Ten still hovers close by, briefly sizing up Shotaro. “I feel good, actually. You?”

“Alright,” he nods. “Kun could do with seeing you again, if you’re done. I think he was in shock.”

“Yeah, me too,” Yangyang says breathlessly, grabbing Ten to head back towards the hall. “I’m really alright now, though. Good job with the rescue, Hyung! We did it!” he calls back up the corridor, laughing to himself as he steps back into the hall, Ten right on his heels.

“Crazy boy,” he murmurs, fond, and turns to go back up the stairwell. Shotaro sticks close behind him, peach already eaten down to the pit.

On the upper floor, he passes the office, the bedroom, and the supply room, only stopping to knock on the door of the hub. He doesn’t wait for a response to enter, but props the door open against his back, stepping aside to let Shotaro look in the room.

“How about it, Hendery?” he asks, throwing his apple core in the bin. “Are we safe for another day?”

“What?” Hendery says, barely sparing him a glance. “Oh, yeah. The tags were no problem. I’m basically a living firewall to hardware or software that’s supposed to work against me,” he grins. “Pretty neat, huh?”

He rolls his eyes, but only because he’s smiling too. “So it’s all quiet out there? I can sleep soundly?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say quiet,” he says, wheeling his seat aside and tilting his monitor for them to see. “Donghyuck and Sungchan made enough noise in there that we’ve been in the news all night, but SM only just officially reported break-out a few minutes ago. People are calling for their operations to be closed and investigated effective immediately now that they’ve lost all of us, so that’s something, but…” he clicks, brings up four rows of profile shots. Twenty-one pictures, side-by-side and labelled with their names, with two blank images at the end. “Every one of us is on the most wanted list now, apart from Kun and Yangyang.”

“Including me and you?”

Hendery upturns his palms, spinning in his chair. “We made it to the hall of fame, Hyung. They’ve only put out a notice for our abilities so far, so they haven’t identified us yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Kun might be put on here too eventually, but they won’t have much video evidence left from their cameras with me in the building. I’m actually kind of impressed they worked out our abilities as quickly as they did.”

“But they don’t have any lead on where we are now, right?”

“Nada. Renjun and Taeyong were supposed to bring everyone right back to the labs, so the tags were just a back-up in case things didn’t go to plan. But they didn’t see me coming.”

Yuta lays one arm over Shotaro’s shoulders, switching to Japanese. “They’re looking for us, but they don’t know where we are. We’re safe here.”

Shotaro is watching the news report play out on Hendery’s wide monitor, their faces flashing past one by one. Then he looks around to Yuta, eyes wide and young. “You promise?”

He thinks back to Mark’s words in the hall. “Yes. We promise.”

Hendery stands from his chair, walking over to offer his hand out to Shotaro. He gives him the gentlest smile Yuta has ever seen on his face, then points to himself and says, “Hendery.”

Shotaro shakes his hand tentatively. “Shotaro,” he says, pointing to himself and smiling back, sweet and shy.

“You definitely have to help me talk to him about his ability sometime,” Hendery says quietly, beaming at Shotaro. “I’m very interested.”

“Sure. But right now,” he says, switching to Japanese again, “it’s time for bed.”

Shotaro nods, allowing Yuta to turn him back out of the room again.

“Goodnight, Hendery,” he says, grabbing the door handle after them. “Clean-up could use you if you fancy finding Jaehyun some salve.”

“Right,” he says, and Yuta can tell he’d totally forgotten about his promise to come back. “Goodnight, Hyung. I’ll go down and help.”

He crosses the corridor with Shotaro under his arm to enter the dim bedroom, where a zonked out Taeyong has been coaxed onto one of the mats, the first asleep. Mark is talking to Taeil in a soft voice as he lays him down beside Taeyong, and Donghyuck and Johnny are working on spreading out more blankets around the room. With all their winter supplies dug out, they might just have enough for everyone to sleep on.

“Hey,” he nods to Donghyuck as they come in. “We’re about to pass out. You should too, soon.”

“Yeah, I’m wiped. You need anything?”

“Nah,” he says, taking the other free mat beside Taeyong and patting the one on his other side, encouraging Shotaro to lie down beside him. “But wake me up if he does.” He subtly nods towards Shotaro.

Donghyuck’s mouth quirks up. “Alright. Will you tell him I’m sorry about the birds?”

Yuta relays the message, and Shotaro smiles, a little sadly. “It’s alright,” he says. “It couldn’t be helped.”

“You’re off the hook,” Yuta translates, settling back onto his pillow.

Donghyuck laughs, soft. “Thanks. Go to sleep now, Hyung. You’ve worked hard today.”

“I sure have,” he sighs, pulling a blanket up over himself and watching as Shotaro does the same. He drops off quickly after that, his body heavy, his mind soothed by the pull of sleep.

-

Six days after they fight their way out of SM, Jaemin approaches him, wringing his hands together nervously.

“Hyung,” he starts, taking a deep breath. Yuta looks up at him from where he’s been hanging out their laundry. He never thought he’d be happy to go back to the normalcy of something like laundry.

“Jaemin,” he says agreeably, finishing putting the pegs on the sweatpants he’s hanging up. The small washing machine in the kitchen is in almost constant use now, but they have no dryer, and Doyoung is quite proud of the makeshift laundry line he’d set up in one of the spare classrooms so many months ago. They usually just throw the windows open and hope for the best when it comes to wearing dry clothes.

“I was wondering if you could help us. Well, help Jisung really, but he doesn’t want to ask.”

That doesn’t surprise him. Jisung doesn’t talk to anyone but Jaemin and Chenle and occasionally Jeno. “Help you with what?”

“Well, you see,” Jaemin says, eyes flitting around the room nervously. “Jisung is very scared of his ability. Hates it, really, but he needs to learn to control it to get his life back. Only he’s too afraid to train with it, because he can’t control it at all, and has destroyed things without meaning to. Whole rooms, he said.” Jaemin bites his lip. “But your ability—it works against other abilities, right? If you could contain him in a dome, do you think that would make a safe space for him to try and use his ability?”

Ever since Yuta had woken up from his fourteen-hour sleep on day one of their collective freedom, he’s hasn’t seen Jisung without gloves on his hands and a long-sleeved shirt covering his arms at any given point. He walks around the hideout with his hands shoved safely under his armpits, and often Jaemin or Chenle have to feed him by hand to convince him to eat. No one talks about it directly, but they all know he can’t go on like that. Jisung must know it too.

“My domes work against all the other physical abilities, yes,” he says, crossing his arms. “You want me to make a training room out of it?”

“Yes,” Jaemin says, looking at him, hopeful. “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

He nods. “It’s a good idea. Have you brought it up with him?”

“Yes. He didn’t want me to ask you about it, but I can tell he was considering it. I thought that maybe if you offered…?”

“I can do that,” he nods. “I’ll talk to him. I won’t be able to hold the dome for longer than thirty minutes or so, though. It’s not a lot of time to practise in.”

“That’s okay,” Jaemin hurries to say. “That’s fine. It’s better than nothing, and maybe he’ll feel happier to train in a normal room, eventually.”

“Fine. I’ll tell the others to give us the hall tomorrow morning for it. You should sit in with us, and bring Jeno.”

“Jeno? Why?”

“His power is quite similar to Jisung’s, isn’t it? Where Jisung breaks things down, Jeno changes them.”

“Well,” Jaemin says, halting. “I suppose so.”

“If Jeno can figure it out, I know your brother can too. Now shoo, I have to finish the laundry.”

“Okay,” Jaemin says, backing away with a small smile on his face. “Thank you so much, Hyung, really.” He reaches the door, opens it, then pauses in the doorway. “Oh, I think we’re having dinner in a minute, though. Taeyong wants everyone to eat together again.”

He nods. “Alright. Tell him I’ll be down when I’m finished.”

Taeyong has been determined to strike up a tentative balance between various members of the group over the past few days. Ten still can’t be in the same room as Jaehyun without sending him dark looks, and Jaehyun could barely look Yangyang’s way without bursting into tears for the first few days. Yangyang couldn’t stand that for very long, so he’d dragged Jaehyun into the bedroom and brought his hand to his sternum and said _see, I’m fine now, it’s like nothing even happened. Also, I think your power is awesome, can you take me walking through walls sometime?_ Yuta knows this because he’d been the one to save Jaehyun from the claws of death after Ten had walked in to see his hands up Yangyang’s shirt. Yangyang had given Ten a firm talking to then too, so now Ten has stopped hissing at Jaehyun every time they pass each other in the hallway. But it’s still a delicate thing.

Yuta thinks mealtimes together is the right idea. They can take account of one another, don’t have to speak if they don’t want to, and aren’t obliged to stick around. But at least it’s one time in the day when they’re all together. They can discuss anything they need to, see faces they might have missed over the past day or so. Know everyone is okay. He often ends up sat next to Shotaro out of practicality, because no one else knows how to speak to him, but Taeyong and Doyoung had asked Yuta to start teaching them some Japanese as a show of goodwill. They’ve had five classes so far, and in that time Lucas, Johnny, Taeil, Jungwoo, and Sungchan have also joined them, one by one. Shotaro sits with them and smiles when they repeat the Japanese back to him, and picks up the Korean words from Yuta while they’re at it, carefully keeping note of them in his notebook.

Still, they’re a long way from holding a conversation, so it’s up to Yuta to tell Shotaro to be careful with the curry because it’s very spicy, or to watch out in the showers because the hot water is acting up again. When he comes down to dinner today, Hendery is also up to his usual annoying antics, sitting on Yuta’s other side and nudging him with his elbow, wiggling his eyebrows every time he looks over. He knows what he wants, and rolls his eyes at him; Yuta has been waiting for Shotaro to open up on his own, truthfully, but he also knows they have to take stock of each other’s capabilities and potential risks in the hideout. With so many of them living here now, everyone has been tiptoeing around Shotaro and Jisung, the two newest of the pack, the two most likely to accidentally wreak havoc. Even Doyoung has asked if him if he knows anything about Shotaro’s ability, which is perhaps a good sign that it is time to press.

“Shotaro,” he starts, watching him shovel instant noodles into his mouth. He always eats like he’s starving, even if he’s just finished a full meal. “Hey. Is everything alright? Does your ability burn calories really fast or something?”

Shotaro looks up at him, eyes wide. “Oh, no. I’m fine, Onii-san. I just love food.”

“Good to know. Don’t be afraid to take seconds if everyone else has already had their firsts.”

Shotaro nods at him, mouth full, eyes shining. Yuta stays quiet for another few minutes, letting him finish his food while working on his own meal. When Shotaro’s plate is empty and his own is getting there, he tries again.

“I was wondering if you could tell me more about your ability, Shotaro. We still don’t understand what you can do, and we don’t know how much control you have, either. Do you have any concerns about it?”

Shotaro watches him speak, then shakes his head, resolute. “My ability is not harmful. The pocket SM told me to open back at the labs is the worst I could do with it. And I’m not like the other boy. I can choose when and how I use it.”

“Jisung,” he corrects quietly. “I’m going to be working with him very soon to help him, too. Can you tell me what you mean by pocket? Is that what you call the setting you created in the training room?”

Shotaro puts his gleaming plate down on the floor, carefully setting his chopsticks on top. “Yes. It is what I call it. It’s a pocket dimension.”

Yuta sets his plate down too. “You’re telling me you can open up other dimensions?”

“I can open up a small section of a dimension, contained to a room. Just like the desert place we were in before. That was a dead dimension—there were no humans living there, and the birds from that place were used to feasting on carcasses.”

“Have you been to that place?”

“No. I’ve only experienced the dimensions in those small amounts. Opening the pockets gives me a preview into another place, and I can see a little bit about that world before it closes again. But I’ve only been able to visit a dimension for real once before.”

“Why only once?”

“Well… when my ability first started, I learned quickly how to conjure a dimension, and how to see into it. I can look through them as easily as flicking through a catalogue. But my problem has always been with stability. In rooms, there are cracks under doors, or vents in the walls, or small gaps along window frames. I can’t maintain a pocket properly because eventually it will start to slip through those cracks. When SM figured this out, they arranged to give me time in an airtight room on my own to see if I could stably conjure another dimension in that room. It was so secure that there was even limited oxygen inside, and I had to do it quickly.”

“But it worked?””

Shotaro nods slowly. “Yes. It allowed me to open the pocket perfectly. I could see a living room, and I could hear someone speaking Japanese. It sounded like my mother. I kept it open for a few minutes, but saw no one, so I tried to close it again. When I did, nothing happened. Or I thought nothing had happened.” He scratches his head. “I had actually closed the dimension correctly, but with myself on the wrong side.”

Yuta sits back. Jaemin had thought that Shotaro’s ability might be similar to Taeyong’s, but this power is so far beyond anything they know. “What was it like? That world?”

“It wasn’t too different from this one. The main difference is that I wasn’t half-Japanese, half-Korean in that place. I was fully Japanese.”

“You used to be Korean?”

Shotaro nods. “It was my first language. When I went through to that place, I lost it all. I lost a lot of my memories, too. For months, I couldn’t even remember I had this ability.”

“You forgot who you were? Completely?”

“Only at first. I had all these new memories from the other dimension instead. I knew my father as Japanese, not Korean. I had new childhood memories. My friends were different, my life. My mother was almost exactly the same, though. I woke up on the floor, confused, and she told me I must have hit my head. For several months, I lived my life there.” He smiles to himself. “I was in a performing arts school for dance. I was really good, and I really loved it.”

“So why did you come back here, where your ability was making life hell?”

His smile fades. “After a few months of living like that, I rediscovered my power. It was weaker, but not gone. The memories of my original life started coming back with it, and they disturbed me. I felt like an imposter in that world. I missed Korea, and I missed my old friends. So I decided to go back. I crawled into my father’s safe, locked myself in, and opened up my own dimension again. I dropped right into the new SM labs.”

“But you didn’t get your Korean back?”

He shakes his head. “I know some of my memories are still missing, too. I’ve only been here for a few weeks, so perhaps they’ll come back with time, but I’ve been missing from this reality for over two years, now. Time must have been running differently in the other world. Coming back didn’t revert me back to my original self, but now I have the memories and experiences of two dimensions. My family here have given up on finding me, and I cannot go and see them without putting them and myself in danger. So now I belong in neither place.”

Yuta puts a hand on Shotaro’s shoulder and brings him forwards, wrapping his arms around him in a hug. Shotaro stiffens in surprise, then carefully rests his chin on Yuta’s shoulder, arms loose at his sides. He rubs a hand up and down Shotaro’s back, ignoring Hendery and Doyoung’s surprised looks, and says,

“I’m so sorry about that, Shotaro. You belong with us, you know, even if you don’t feel like it yet. You’ll settle again soon, I know it.”

Shotaro doesn’t move for a minute or so, and Yuta lets the sniffling into his neck pass without comment. When he leans back out, he’s red-eyed and pink-cheeked. “SM had changed so much by the time I got back. They didn’t want to help me anymore. They wanted to keep me. I wanted to leave, but they weren’t letting us.”

“I know. That’s why we had to get everyone out. You must have been picked up by SM very early if you remember them as good helpers.”

“Yes. I was the first one they found. My uncle knew the signs of my ability as soon as they appeared, and we searched for help. I struggling to adapt, and the founders of SM were interested in space and time travel. That’s why they took me in. I think they are interested in rather different things now.”

Yuta flashes a smile at Taeyong, who throws him a questioning glance from across the table. Many of the others have long since left the dinner table to go about their own business, but several of the older members are still sat in front of their empty plates, not-so-subtly waiting for Yuta and Shotaro to finish. “We always thought Taeyong was the first one,” he tells Shotaro. “SM never told us they lost someone before him.”

Shotaro shrugs. “Why would they? They didn’t know if I would ever come back. Or if I could.”

That’s true enough. “How did your uncle recognise your abilities? Does someone else in your family have abilities too?”

He blinks up at him. “Oh, no. He was one of the scientists who worked on the…” he trails off, glancing around the room. “Oh. I suppose you wouldn’t know.”

“Know what?”

“Do any of you know how we all got these abilities?”

Yuta straightens up. “No. Do you?”

He nods, mouth pulling into a line. “Yes. It was an experimental drugs trial held in Seoul in the early 90s. They brought in thirty men to trial an injection that could supposedly enhance their DNA. The drugs were very secret, and very controversial even amongst those who knew. Definitely illegal. It was something a Chinese scientist had been working on, and he recruited all different types of men in Korea to do the testing, paid them very good money to keep quiet about it. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. After it was all done and tested, there were no results to report, and no money left to find out why it didn’t work. My uncle was one of the three scientists running it. The other two gave up and moved on, but he waited and kept in contact with several of the test subjects. He thought that the mutated DNA might just take time to activate properly. Do you know Terada Takuya?”

The name takes him by surprise. “I do, actually. He’s an old friend of my father’s. He used to visit us all the time, but they fell out when…” he furrows his brow. “Well. Around the time my ability manifested, actually.”

Shotaro smiles at him, small and apologetic. “Your father was one of the men who took part in the trials, and Takuya was one of the men in charge. Twenty-five years after the trials, the effects of the experimental drugs started presenting in me and you and all the other biological sons of those men. Takuya is my uncle, and he was living with us when my abilities first showed, so he recognised what they were very quickly. He was excited about it at first, but when he tried to help me, he became afraid for me. Afraid for my future… afraid of my ability and what it could do. When SM found me and offered to help me, I said that I would go with them, but Uncle Takuya asked me never to reveal the truth about the trials to them. It was illegal, so he didn’t want to get into trouble, but more than that… he was worried that they might ask him to repeat the experiments.” He looks down at where he’s twiddling with his shoelace. “My ability has made my life difficult. I’m sure many of you here feel the same way. I want you to know that he regrets the experiments very much, and the way they’ve split apart my family. All your families, too.”

He sits back, taking in a deep breath. “You’re really something, you know. We’ve all been wondering why we have these abilities for years now, and you just waltz in from your alternate dimension with all the answers. I can’t believe my father never told me about this.”

“Now you know.”

Yuta looks around the table. Doyoung, Taeyong, Taeil, Johnny and Kun are the only ones left sat around it, talking between themselves in low voices and taking badly concealed glances at the two of them. Hendery and Renjun are moving in and out between the hall and the kitchen, gathering the plates to be washed, Hendery sending pointed looks to Yuta each time he passes. “Is it okay if I tell the others everything you’ve told me?” he asks, gesturing to them. “They’ll be excited to hear it.”

Shotaro nods. “Yes. But please tell them that the truth about the trials are a secret.”

“I will,” he reassures him. “Your uncle’s secret is safe with us.” He pats his shoulder, taking in a deep breath as he considers the long conversation he’s about to have with Taeyong and the others. “Hey—do you like video games, by any chance?”

Shotaro looks thrown by the sudden change in topic, but brightens up with his answer. “I really loved them in my first life. I miss them.”

“Good. It’s Saturday, so games night will be starting in the hub round about now. That’ll be where all the kids have run off to. Go up and say, ‘can I play with you?’” He sounds the Korean words out clearly, and Shotaro repeats them back to him, quieter. “Good. Now go and catch them before they get too into it.”

Shotaro stands from the floor, dusting himself down and repeating _can I play with you_ to himself a few times. Doyoung smiles at him as he turns to leave, and Shotaro gives him a smile and awkward wave back, then a nervous glance back at Yuta. Yuta sends him a thumbs up, then Shotaro jogs from the room, closing the big hall doors behind him. Hendery passes him on the way in, grinning at him, then turning the toothy smile to Yuta. Renjun comes in after him and—surprisingly—sits down beside Johnny. Renjun hasn’t spoken a word to anyone since the first night he arrived here, and is rarely seen without Jaemin or Jeno at his side, or occasionally Lucas. Perhaps he’s also curious about the mystery of his labsmate.

All eyes turn to Yuta, who shuffles further down the table to sit closer to them. He can tell a knowing grin is growing on his face, but he can’t help himself; Shotaro just gave him the answers to two years’ worth of questions in under ten minutes, then left to go and play Mario Kart.

“Are there any leftovers?” he asks, though it’s clear there’s nothing left on the table.

“None, sorry.” Taeil says. “Johnny and Lucas eat like animals, and we still haven’t figured out the right amount to cook for twenty-three people.”

Johnny raises his hands in self-defence. “What, do you think this ability is fuelled by magic?”

Taeil and Johnny have eased up a lot since their first arrival here, after being forgiven a thousand times over for the incidents at the labs. Donghyuck quite likes retelling the story of his fight with Johnny like it’s a scene from a movie rather than a near-death experience, but his nonchalance about it all seems to put Johnny at ease. Yuta is glad for it, and can only hope the rest of the newcomers will follow suit and settle in too, soon.

“That’s okay,” he says, crossing his legs under him. “We’ll have to draft them into the food-gathering trips to make up for it.”

“Come on, Yuta,” Taeyong whines. “Stop stalling. What did Shotaro tell you? I can tell it was something important.”

“His ability is dimension warping, isn’t it?” Hendery says, leaning over the table with his chin in his hand. “I’m right, aren’t I?”

Yuta grins with all his teeth and leans over the table to meet him. Doyoung unconsciously mimics him, leaning in too, gaze trained on Yuta’s face. “Oh, it’s so much more than that. You’re not going to believe this.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ch6 + 7 are best read together and were only really separated by the change in perspective, so enjoy two uploads in one go!
> 
> thanks again for your comments! i seriously smile every time i get one and see your reactions, i'm so glad ppl have been enjoying this so far. we r near the end now!


	7. Jisung

Renjun has nightmares, most nights. Jisung does too, ends up lying awake for hours because of them, so he hears the whimpers Renjun makes in his sleep. The little noises are the loudest he’s been since the night they were all rescued. Jeno is a deep sleeper, but Jaemin sometimes wakes up to the noises and rolls over to bracket Renjun in his arms, stroking his hair and whispering in his ear until he quietens down again.

Jisung just curls up in his corner and shakes after his dreams, careful to stay quiet. He doesn’t want Jaemin to have to worry about him too. Chenle knows, though, and so does Taeil. Chenle barely ever takes his eyes off him, and sometimes Jisung will wake up to Taeil sleeping nearby, close enough to make him feel safe, far away enough that he feels like Taeil will be safe. It’s a small comfort when he can hear the ring in his ears of _you will obey orders, you will obey orders, you will obey orders,_ and has to remind himself that the labs are behind him now. He doesn’t have to feel that helpless ever again. No more hours or days of missing time, feeling tired and confused when he eventually came back to himself. No more orders, no more acting on someone else’s intentions. No more feeling like an alien in his own skin. He can rest. They’re safe. He’s safe.

A week after they arrive at the hideout, Jisung jerks awake at daybreak to the sound of footsteps leaving the bedroom. He sits up carefully, looking around the room—Yuta and Dejun are on watch tonight, but everyone else is still sound asleep. Glancing at the bed that Jaemin and his boyfriends usually share, he knows that the only other person missing is Renjun.

He quietly picks himself up from the floor to follow him out of the door, closing it carefully behind him. “Hyung?”

Renjun had been the first one to try and talk to Jisung in the labs after he’d arrived. He’d never even been able to see Jisung from beyond the blindfold he always wore, but he’d tried to reach out to him anyway. If Jisung had been brave he could’ve asked him about Jaemin and learned about their relationship, and perhaps they could’ve given each other comfort. Now Renjun is the one who doesn’t speak to anyone, not since they arrived at the hideout. Not even to Jaemin or Jeno—maybe especially not to them.

So when he verbally hums in response to Jisung, facing the pale light of the morning, Jisung is touched. He thinks it might be a sign of trust—Jisung doesn’t speak much either, but he’s slowly opening up to the others now that he’s settling here, happily hidden away from the world. Away from the scientists and guards, back with his brother and his best friend and all their friends, all these people who feed him and play games with him and talk to him so gently even though he doesn’t deserve it.

He knows some of them are still afraid of him, though. They should be. He’s afraid too.

“You okay?” he asks, walking over to the deep-set window seat Renjun is perched on, legs pulled up to his chest. Renjun doesn’t look at him, but stares out at the misty playing fields with a little sigh.

Jisung comes to sit on the floor, just out of reaching distance of Renjun. Of everyone here, he thinks that Renjun might understand him the most. Some of the others have abilities with the capacity to be destructive, as they all know well, but Renjun’s is the only other ability here that is innately harmful. Whatever he does with it, he cannot shy away from the fact that his ability gives him an unnatural control no human should possess.

Jisung is the same. He’s Yuta’s opposite—he can only destroy.

“What are you two doing up?” Taeil’s voice says from further down the hall.

Jisung turns his head to see him stood outside the bedroom door, hair tousled, rubbing sleepy eyes. “Sorry, Hyung,” he says, curling his hands around his knees. On the window seat, Renjun turns his head, leaning it back against the wall.

“I’m not reprimanding you,” Taeil says through a yawn. “I know sleep is hard. But you guys can come to me if you need anything, okay?”

Renjun nods slowly, eyes sad. Jisung does too, giving him a small smile. He likes Taeil. Even when Jisung couldn’t make himself speak or eat, even when he could barely look the other boys in the eye, Taeil had done his best to look out for him. He’d been the one to feed him on nights when Jisung was too paranoid to pick up his chopsticks, even after SM had given him the gloves. He’d made sure Jisung never missed a meal even if it meant he had to rush to eat his own.

“Good,” he says, and the door swings open again to reveal Taeyong. He stretches with a groan and rasps something about Taeil not being there to cuddle, wrapping his arms around his middle and resting his chin on his shoulder.

The others will be up soon. He knows Sicheng still pretends to sleep through most of the night, because sometimes he can feel waves of uncertainty or fear or regret from him when he’s supposedly asleep. Johnny is always an early riser, but tends to wait for someone else to get up first so he doesn’t feel like he’s disturbing the group. Shotaro and Lucas seem to be the only ones from the labs who have learned how to sleep soundly through the night, because Jaehyun never seems to sleep at all.

“You lasted this long without me,” Taeil says, but he’s smiling, letting Taeyong walk him down the hall still grasped between his arms.

“Don’t want to anymore,” Taeyong grumbles, voice low.

Like clockwork, Johnny appears in the doorway behind them, looking out at the scene in the hallway. He raises his eyebrows at the two of them and points with exaggerated disbelief.

“Those two, huh? It’s too early for you to be all over each other!”

“If you get over here, you could join in and stop being jealous,” Taeyong says, gesturing a lazy hand over his shoulder.

Johnny shakes his head and puts his hands on his hips. “Unbelievable.” He turns to face Jisung and Renjun. “We’re on breakfast duty, so come down soon, okay?”

He nods again. “Thanks, Hyung,” he whispers, and Johnny practically beams at him for getting those two words out.

“No problem. I’ll save you a bowl of whatever it is, Jisung,” he says, winking. Then he follows after Taeil and Taeyong, who are quietly laughing together. It’s nice. He was only at the labs for a few weeks, but he knows Johnny and Taeil were there for so much longer—Renjun and Lucas, too. He can’t imagine how freed they must feel to finally be back with their loved ones.

(He hasn’t had the courage yet to ask what’s going on between some of the older members. It’s sweet, whatever it is.)

He looks back up at the window to find Renjun is looking at him. Not directly, because he never does, but just to the left of his eyes, at his cheek. He spares him a little smile, and that’s a rare sight, too. Maybe today will be a good day. Maybe they really will be okay, eventually.

“You want to come and eat with me?” he asks. It’s peaceful here in the hallway, but he doesn’t really want to be here when everyone starts emerging from the bedroom.

Renjun just shakes his head, turning to look back out of the window.

Jisung nods, mostly to himself, then pushes himself to his feet. He peeks in through the window of the bedroom door as he passes—Chenle is rousing, looking around the room for him, so Jisung waves to catch his eye. Chenle drags himself up and comes to the doorway, and Jisung backs up enough to put a safe distance between them in the corridor.

“Hi,” Chenle says, undeterred by the space. “You okay?” He turns his head to direct the question at Renjun too, who pretends not to notice him.

“We’re okay,” he says. “The Hyungs are making breakfast.”

“Good,” Chenle says, ruffling his bedhead so that it only sticks out more. “I’m starving.”

Jisung fiddles with the strap of his leather glove, making sure it’s secure, a repetitive habit he’s trying to kick. “Me too. Wanna go get first dibs?”

“Duh,” Chenle says, but he’s smiling through it, like he does whenever Jisung gets out more than a few words at a time. It’s nice. Makes him feel like he’s improving.

Jisung sticks closer to the wall as he and Chenle walk down the hallway— it gives him a minor heart attack when the office door opens as they pass by it and Yuta stands there, eyes flicking between the two of them. Jisung jumps back, pressing a hand to his chest, and usually he would be quick to complain about being scared first thing in the morning but it’s still difficult to talk to people who aren’t Chenle or Jaemin or a few of the others from the labs. Especially Yuta. Jisung thinks he’s way too intimidating.

“Good morning,” Yuta is saying, like he can see through walls or something and knew they were both right outside the room. “I was hoping to catch you, Na Jisung.”

He points to himself, mouth dropping open. Him?

“What’s wrong?” Chenle asks in his stead.

“A birdie told me you were open to the idea of training if I used my ability to help you.”

He can feel his cheeks heating up, and he looks down at his shoes. He had been hoping Jaemin wouldn’t mention it—it’s way too embarrassing to need to be coddled in bubble wrap just to be able to approach his ability, like he’s a baby taking his first steps. Yuta is so cool, has his ability so well mastered, and Jisung can’t even hold a spoon without ruining it.

“We were talking about it as a group,” Chenle says, glancing at Jisung. “Your ability works against pretty much everything, right?”

“It works against every physical ability I know of. It kept us alive under the collapsed basement, and it kept Johnny contained as long as I needed it to. I already contained you for a little while too, Jisung, if you remember that.”

He looks up again, nervously meeting Yuta’s eyes. He does remember it, fleetingly. He remembers he didn’t do anything to stop it because Renjun was gaining on Taeyong, as planned. Yuta had only trapped him because Jisung had let him.

He bites his lip, and Chenle looks between them.

“We can have a few others there to help you, if you like. Jeno might be able to counter your ability if it spreads somehow, and Sicheng could be there to give you a confidence boost.”

He’s aware that this is the best offer he’s going to get in terms of training. And he does want to control his ability—he wants to be able to hug Jaemin, wants to wrestle with Chenle again, wants to be able to feel Ten’s cat fur with his fingertips. These people are his friends, his family. They will make sure everything is okay. He is safe here. He is safe.

He nods, small and reserved, but Yuta smiles at him, satisfied. “Good. I’ll round up the team, you go and get some breakfast. We’ll start in the hall while it’s still early.”

So soon? He regretfully releases the good mood he’d woken up with—in his weeks training with SM, he’s never left a training session feeling anything but despairing.

“Thank you,” Chenle is saying. “We’ll see you there.”

Yuta nods, then passes between them in the hallway, and Jisung flattens himself against the wall to avoid brushing against him. Chenle watches him go, then turns to Jisung, talking quickly as they head for the stairwell again.

“Did you tell Jaemin you would practise with Yuta?”

He shakes his head. He feels slightly put out that Jaemin had gone to ask Yuta anyway, but even as they were speaking about it he’d known that he would, deep down. Jaemin doesn’t give up on things lightly.

“Are you really okay with it? You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.” Jisung slows to a stop in the middle of the stairwell, looking down at Chenle, who walks a few more steps down before he stops too. “It’s up to you, you know. You should do this for you, and not because the others want you to.”

He shoves his hands up to his armpits, looking down at the floor. “I know they’re afraid of me,” he whispers.

Chenle takes a few steps up again until he’s level with Jisung, but still an arm’s length away, as he knows Jisung prefers. “No one is afraid of you,” he says, firm. “But some of us are afraid for you. We want you to feel safe again, and controlling your ability is a huge part of that. But you shouldn’t do it because we want you to. You should do it because you want it.”

He glances up at Chenle’s face. Despite two years of distance, slipping back into their friendship was so easy. Having grown up together, he knows him as well as he knows Jaemin, and had missed him just as much. They’re like two halves of the same person sometimes, and he’s relieved that their familiarity is just as strong now, the one constant he can rely on.

Chenle himself is different, though. He’s more serious and more grown than before. He treats Jisung like another adult, even when it feels like no one else here does. They never used to talk like this before, so serious and honest, but it’s been a long time since they were both kids, and so much has changed since then. That was before Chenle had developed his power, before he spent time in SM—before Jisung had dropped a building on Chenle and Yuta and almost killed Kun. In some ways it feels like nothing has changed, but in so many other ways, everything between them has changed.

“I do want it,” he finds himself saying. “I want to be normal again.”

Chenle looks at him for a long moment, scanning his face. “We can’t go back to being normal, but you can learn belong to yourself again. You can do it if you practise, I know it. We’ll all support you.”

He buries his gloved hands further into the folds of his hoodie, heart skipping. The others will be there, all watching him. It’ll be the first time Chenle and Yuta have seen his power since that day in the basement, and they still want to help Jisung. He doesn’t deserve this, but he’s so, so grateful for it.

The door at the top of the stairwell swings open and Jaemin comes bounding through, beaming smile on his face, Renjun’s hand in his. Jeno trails just behind them, rubbing his eyes and holding the door open for Sicheng, who mumbles a thanks.

“Jisung!” he sing-songs, far too loud for this hour of the morning. “Yuta told me you’re going to practise with him!”

He rolls his eyes and starts to walk down the rest of the stairs, Chenle at his side. “Like you didn’t set it up, Hyung.”

“But you said yes!” he points out, gleefully, and Jisung sees Renjun tugging on his arm out of the corner of his eye. They share a look, something pointed passing between them mentally. “I’m just pleased,” Jaemin whines, skipping down the steps with a smile in his voice. “I’m proud of you! This is such good progress!”

“There won’t be any progress if we don’t get down these stairs sometime today,” Yuta’s voice says from the top of the steps, coming through the doorway behind Sicheng. “Let’s get a move on, quickly, and get some food.”

Taeil is making a pot of ramen for breakfast while Taeyong and Johnny make out against the fridge. Jisung blinks once at the sight of mussed hair and roaming hands, then immediately backs out of the kitchen, deciding to wait for food in the sports hall instead. When Yuta and Jaemin brings the bowls through, he stomachs as much of it as he can, sizing up the space in the hall as he chews. It’s big, and he knows it will be easy to isolate his power in here, especially with Yuta helping him. He’s becoming more aware of the fact that this is going to be nothing more than a show of his incompetence, though; everyone knows he doesn’t know how to reign in his power, but now they’ll get to see first-hand just how out of control he is.

“Alright,” Yuta says once he’s finished his bowl. “Better get going now before you decide to back out. Come on.”

He puts his bowl down on the floor, standing up behind Yuta. Jaemin glances at the amount of food he’s left. “Are you sure you’re ready?”

He shrugs. Not really, but he never will be.

“Let’s see what you can do to start with. Even if you feel like you can’t control anything, the fact that you’re willing to try is a good sign, Jisung,” Yuta says, standing and walking into the centre of the hall. “Here should be fine.”

Jisung follows him, coming to stand right over the central basketball court markings on the floor. Yuta has turned to walk over to the scrap pile, where he picks up a cracked mug, testing it between his hands.

“This will do. Catch.” He throws the mug in his direction, and Jisung catches it in his gloved hands. Even this much contact is making his heart race.

Jaemin, Chenle, Renjun, Jeno and Sicheng sit around the low dining table in the corner, watching him. If he listens carefully, he can hear Taeyong’s voice down the hall, still in the kitchen—he thinks Yuta must have asked for privacy, because Taeyong usually likes to come in and eat meals with them. He appreciates it. Even this many people in the room is nerve-wracking.

“Are you ready? I’m about to dome you. It might sound a bit muffled in there, but let me know if it’s uncomfortable. Dejun is claustrophobic, so he doesn’t really like being in my domes.”

Yuta raises his hands to chest level, keeping them close to his body, and touches his fingertips together. A shining wall suddenly arches over Jisung’s head, encircling him completely—it’s under his feet too, a sturdy barrier between himself and any part of the outside world. He thinks it’s beautiful.

“You okay?” Jaemin calls out, and he nods. The noise in here is muffled like he’d said, but not by much. Just like he’s hearing everyone talk through a plastic screen.

“Okay, Jisung,” Yuta says, voice steady. “How long do you think you could hold the mug before it disintegrates?”

“Not even a second,” he answers, voice small.

“Alright,” Yuta says. “Can I see that?”

His hands tremble slightly as he squats to place the mug on the dome’s floor, pulling at the straps of his gloves. _You’re safe in here, it’s safe,_ he thinks, trying to steady his breathing. He can show them. _It’s okay. You can’t touch them in here._

He slips one glove off, dropping it to the floor, then uses his teeth to unstrap the other one, letting it drop from his hand. The cracked mug shines under the gentle glow of Yuta’s dome, and his breath shakes, hands hovering over it. He can pick it up. It’s okay, he can pick it up, he can’t do any harm in here.

He picks up the mug with both hands in one quick motion. He just has the time to feel the ceramic against his palms before it’s crumbling into dust, running through his fingers, forming a small pile on the floor. When it’s completely gone, he shakily wipes the fine remains from his fingers, glancing up at the six pairs of eyes on him.

“Okay,” Yuta says, voice as level as ever. “Interesting. I’m going to release the dome for a moment, Jisung.”

He’s dropped very slightly onto the floor as the dome disappears from underneath and around him, and he wobbles slightly with it, losing his balance. He braces his knees against the floor to avoid catching himself with his hands. Yuta goes to the scrap pile again, and this time he picks up an empty bottle of soju.

“I’m going to let you in on a secret, Jisung. Having control over your ability is all in the mind. For you and me, and for Jaemin and Renjun, and even for people like Johnny or Chenle. We all had learn mental control before we could learn physical control.” He walks back over to the place he was stood in before, holding the bottle in one hand, watching Jisung kneel on the floor. “Here’s the best bit, though. You already have mental control.”

In his peripheral, he can see Jaemin’s head whip around to look at Yuta. He’s surprised too—what has given Yuta the idea that he has any sort of control?

“Do you know how I know that?” Yuta asks.

Jisung shakes his head, and Yuta smiles. It’s a knowing, cattish thing.

“It’s your gloves. Where did you get them from?”

Jisung looks down at his discarded gloves. “An SM scientist gave me them,” he says, voice rough. “She told me they would help.”

“Do you know what they’re made of?”

“Leather.”

“Leather,” Yuta repeats. “Not iron, not gold. Nothing special SM customised just for you. They’re just gloves. They touch your hands all the time. But you’ve never disintegrated them, have you?”

Jisung looks up at him again, letting the idea trickle through his mind. He’s right.

“Because you think the gloves will protect you, they do,” Yuta says, voice strong. “It’s a trick of the mind. Because you don’t want to disintegrate them, you don’t.”

There’s panic rising in his chest. He’s never thought twice about putting the gloves on before—perhaps, somewhere deep inside, he’d known the paradox of wearing them all along. The placebo effect, the comfort blanket that Yuta has just yanked away from him and torn to pieces. If he touches the gloves now and they disintegrate, what is he going to do? He’ll have nothing left to protect himself, to protect everyone and everything around him—

“Catch,” Yuta says, throwing the bottle towards him, and he barely reacts fast enough to stop it from hitting the floor. He’s still thinking about the gloves, about stopping the glass from shattering on the floor, and he’s not really thinking about holding the bottle at all—but he is holding it, whole in his hand, solid and heavy against his palm. He stares at it. Then it disintegrates.

He looks up. Yuta had put his shield up somewhere between throwing it and Jisung catching it, and the dust rests on the dome floor again.

“I held it,” he says, and his own voice echoes back at him. “I’ve never held something for that long before.”

Yuta’s mouth curls up at the side, satisfied. “Third time lucky, Jisung.”

He walks back to the scrap pile again, picking up the hairbrush Johnny had apologetically thrown out yesterday. He’d accidentally snapped it in half whilst using it, and the handle is barely hanging on anymore, swinging like a hinge. Yuta walks over and sets it just outside the dome, before releasing his ability so that Jisung can shuffle forwards. Then he brings up the shield again so that both Jisung and the brush are inside.

“This time, I want you to imagine that the gloves are on your hands. Imagine they can do the same thing as my domes. I don’t want you to picture it, necessarily, but feel it—if you believe they’re there, and that they’ll protect you, they will. It’s about controlling your thoughts, you understand? Your own belief. If you believe it will work, then it will.”

His heart is beating fast, some part adrenaline, some part excitement, a certain part fear. Yuta is right. This can work, and he so badly wants to get it right.

“Take your time.”

He tries to follow Yuta’s instructions carefully, closing his eyes and imagining his hands are protected by the same shining barriers as the one around him. His hands don’t have to do harm. If he can hold the hairbrush the same way he held the bottle, without fear, without knowing what will come next, maybe he can start holding his own chopsticks at dinner again. Maybe he can play video games with the others, in the future. Maybe he can hold Chenle’s hand one day.

He picks up the broken hairbrush, holding it in both palms like something precious. When it doesn’t immediately disintegrate, his heart leaps in his chest, but he forces himself to concentrate—the domes are there, they’re there, and they’re steady—and it takes most of his focus, but time is passing and he’s still holding the hairbrush, it’s still whole in his hands. He cracks open his eyes to see Jaemin rising up onto his knees in his peripheral vision, hands clasped together, and the movement distracts him slightly. The hairbrush starts to disintegrate, but more slowly than before, like his ability has been diluted.

“Woah,” he gasps, as the last of it falls between his fingers. “I’ve never done that before.”

He looks up at Yuta, who’s watching him, pleased. “Congratulations. Give it time and plenty of practise, and you’ll be doing that without even knowing it.”

He sits back on his haunches and smiles, hard. For the first time in weeks, he feels a little bit like himself again.

“Jisung!” Jaemin is saying, unable to restrain himself any longer. “Well done! You did so well!”

“Before we finish,” Yuta says, as Jisung moves to stand. “I was wondering if we could try something else.”

Jisung looks back at him. “Something else?”

“It’s okay if it doesn’t work,” he says. “But hell, why not try?”

“Okay,” he agrees. “What is it?”

“Can you gather the pile of dust up in your hands?”

He looks down at the remains of the hairbrush, sitting on the bottom layer of Yuta’s shield. He’s reluctant to touch Yuta’s dome directly, and looks back up at him, unsure.

“It’s okay, I promise.”

Confidence dropping fast, he follows Yuta’s instruction anyway, because he hasn’t led him wrong so far. He lightly brushes his hand against the dome floor, gathering the dust pile in his palms. Yuta’s shield wavers slightly, but doesn’t yield, doesn’t show any sign of collapse. He breathes out, relieved and slightly in awe. His shields really are that good.

“Now,” Yuta says, sounding nervous for the first time. “I want you to close your eyes, like you did before. Go into the mindset of believing, not just picturing. Are you there?”

He nods, swallowing.

“Good. I want you to believe that the hairbrush is sat in your hands again, in one piece. It feels solid, like a weight in your hands. You know that you can rebuild what you break, right? Every ability has more than one side to it, including yours.”

He resists the urge to open his eyes again, the words taking him by surprise. Rebuild? Could he really do something like that? He tries to comprehend it—that he could reverse everything he’s ever ruined. His bed at home, the desk in his form classroom. The walls of the holding room in the police station, where he’d waited for SM to come for him, anxious that he would disappear just like his brother.

Could he undo it all?

There’s a sharp intake of breath, and Jisung’s eyes snap open, looking for Chenle. He’s on his feet, looking down at Jisung’s palms from the other side of the hall.

Jisung looks down too. There, resting in his hands, is the hairbrush—no longer hanging in two pitiful pieces, but whole and hard and fixed. He grips it and runs it through his hair. It doesn’t dissolve, so he laughs, looking at the fine hair caught in the head of the brush. It’s still there, not dissolving again like everything else, and he’d done that with his own bare hands.

He doesn’t have to destroy. He can rebuild.

Yuta releases his dome and Jaemin is already running over, coming to his knees in front of him. He doesn’t reach out to touch, which Jisung is grateful for, but he’s positively beaming.

“You did it!” he exclaims, leaning in so Jisung can’t help but see his smile. “I knew you could!”

“I fixed it,” he says, putting the hairbrush carefully on the floor between them. “I did that!”

“How did you know he could do that?” Chenle asks, gaping at Yuta.

“I didn’t,” Yuta admits, walking past Jisung to pick up his gloves. “But I’ve seen Jeno revert things back to their original state. It’s the same concept.”

“Oh,” Jeno says, eyes round. “You’re right.”

“You’re a genius,” Jaemin tells him, gushing. “I knew you could help us, Hyung.”

“You’re welcome,” Yuta says, dropping the gloves at Jisung’s side. “Now I’m going to bed. Shall we practise again at the same time tomorrow, Jisung?”

“Yes, please,” he says, watching Yuta salute and walk over to the hall doors. “Thank you so much, Hyung.”

“No problem. It was all you, really.” He swings open the door, waving over the back of his head, and walks away down the hall without another word.

Jisung reaches out for his gloves, but hesitates before he can touch them. He looks up at Jaemin, who wiggles his eyebrows at him, and Jisung cracks a smile. He reaches again, grasping them both in his hands and pulling them on securely, rather than wriggling his fingers into them as he usually does.

They go on without a problem, without disintegrating in the slightest. He smiles down at his hands, sitting back on his butt.

Yeah. Maybe he will be okay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the final chapter should be up in the next few days :)


	8. Johnny

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Final recap of all abilities:  
> Taeyong: Teleportation  
> Jungwoo: Superspeed  
> Sungchan: Vibrations/quakes  
> Hendery: Technopath  
> Ten: Cat shapeshifting  
> Jeno: Material manipulation  
> Jaemin: Memory manipulation/exploration  
> Dejun: Weather creation/manipulation  
> Donghyuck: Explosions  
> Chenle: Superhuman combat abilities  
> Mark: Foresight  
> Kun: Healing  
> Doyoung: Illusions  
> Jaehyun: Density manipulation  
> Sicheng: Empath/mood manipulation  
> Lucas: Unbreakable body  
> Johnny: Superstrength  
> Yuta: Force fields  
> Taeil: Energy manipulation  
> Renjun: Compulsion - mind/body control  
> Yangyang: Revival  
> Shotaro: Dimension travel/manipulation  
> Jisung: Disintegration/restoration

“So what exactly is going on between you and the others?” Lucas asks over their game of Ludo, as brazen as ever.

“What others?” he responds, moving his piece three spaces along to send Jungwoo’s piece back to base. Jungwoo curses at him under his breath, snatching his piece up from the board.

“Don’t act dumb, Hyung,” Donghyuck drawls, taking the dice to throw his roll. “We’re all wondering what it is.”

“Taeyong, Doyoung, Kun, Taeil. Is Yuta in on it too?” Lucas asks, grinning from ear to ear. Johnny is honestly surprised it took Lucas this long to ask in the first place, but he has a sneaking suspicion he’d only noticed it for the first time yesterday. Sungchan had whispered something lengthy into his ear at dinner, and Lucas had exclaimed _seriously??_ loud enough for the whole table to turn and look at him. Then he’d laughed to himself in his typically raucous way as Sungchan had ducked his head with a nervous smile, and both of them had refused to explain what was so funny.

But yeah. He’d been expecting this question sooner or later.

“Yuta is in on it,” he confirms. “He’s just not into PDA, while the rest of us don’t really care.”

“I think everything counts as PDA when you live in a commune,” Mark mumbles from where he has his head in Donghyuck’s lap.

“How does that even work?” Jungwoo asks. “Is there a structure to it, or did you all just want to shit on societal roles so badly that you said fuck it, five boyfriends?”

“Fuck the government,” Donghyuck chips in agreeably, passing the dice to Lucas.

“It just kind of happened,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck. “Taeil and Taeyong were together since before the labs, and SM never stopped them from being together. Well, you know. Until they tried to take Taeyong’s leg off and locked Taeil away.”

“Yes, yes,” Donghyuck says, waving his hands. “Get to the good bit, please.”

“You already know I was roommates with Taeyong back at the labs. He told me back then that he and Taeil were in an open relationship. So we messed about a bit, just kissing and stuff. It was fun to pass the time when they gave us those ridiculously early curfews, you know?”

“You guys are freaky,” Ten informs him, and Johnny whirls around. He must have transformed up from cat form, because he’s got cat hair stuck all over his cardigan and Johnny had definitely not known he was right behind him. That was probably the point, because Ten grins like he’s won a prize. “How did good Christian boy Kun get dragged into all of that?”

“I don’t think you know my brother very well,” Yangyang says from the doorway, never far behind Ten.

“He’s getting to that bit,” Lucas whines. “Let him finish! Carry on, Hyung.”

“Well,” Johnny says, stressing the word. “Taeyong has a lot of love to give, and Taeil is very agreeable to everything, so when Doyoung came to the labs he got dragged into it too. He was tense all the time when he first arrived, do you remember? Taeil liked it when he would let loose and smile at us after kissing. It is pretty cute.”

“Bleh,” Donghyuck says, making a face, and Mark laughs at him from the floor. “You’re way less cool than you make out to be, Hyung.”

“I’m very cool,” he corrects, not missing a beat. “When the four of us were split up, we just carried on with what we were doing, I guess. Taeil and I were at the labs, Doyoung and Taeyong were here, and Taeyong still had all this affection to give out. You guys probably know the next bit better than me, but then Yuta and Kun came along, and Taeyong is so fond of them. It’s sweet. I like them too.”

“So will you start kissing my brother in the near future too?” Yangyang asks, narrowing his eyes at Johnny. “I thought three boyfriends was a lot. I don’t know if I can keep up with five of you.”

Johnny laughs, rubbing the back of his neck and wondering how all five of his sort-of boyfriends managed to be absent from this conversation. “Not yet. I only met him and Yuta a few weeks ago, and we haven’t talked about anything like that yet, what with everything else going on. But maybe in the future.” He likes Kun a lot. He seems so soft and gentle, like Taeil, but in a way that makes Johnny almost afraid to approach him. Like he’s too good, too precious to hold. He and Yuta have warmed up to each other fast enough considering the way they met, so it’s probably only a matter of time before he gets involved with him, too.

“God, and I’m the only one of the older guys not in on the game,” Ten sighs, leaning back on his elbow. “Why don’t I get five hot boyfriends?”

“Because you have one super-hot boyfriend,” Yangyang says, wrapping his arms around Ten’s shoulders and climbing half on top of him. “You can’t date me and my brother at the same time.”

“You’re, like, moderately hot,” Ten teases. “And I just put up with you. But you’re right, I’m not into freaky dating dynamics like these guys.”

“You guys won’t break up though, right?” Mark asks, tilting his head up to look at Johnny. “That would be, like, so bad for the hideout social structure.”

“You tell me,” Johnny says, as the dice is passed back to him again. “How is my future, oh wise one?”

“I don’t know, I’m not—”

“Yeah, yeah, we get it,” Donghyuck drawls. “You don’t know the whole future. He’s kidding, idiot.”

“I was going to say I’m not a relationship councillor,” Mark says, swatting at Donghyuck. “I think I’d have to spend, like, seven years at college to be qualified enough to judge them.”

“Right?” Jungwoo says, gleefully watching Donghyuck knock one of Lucas’s pieces from the board. “I’d say it’s a side effect of communal living, but I don’t think the labs count as communal. We were just stuck inside the whole time.”

“Not like much has changed since then,” Donghyuck says. “It could definitely be a side effect of being cooped up, couldn’t it? Though we probably get out more now, if Taeyong lets you do the supply run. God, I can’t remember the last time I actually took a walk to get somewhere. Like, honest to god using my legs to walk down a street.”

Sicheng, who’s perched on the window ledge behind them to quietly watch the game, swings a leg down to face them better. “Same,” he chips in, glum. “We swapped one prison for another.”

“That’s a bit fatalistic,” Yangyang says lightly. “It’s a safehouse, not a prison.”

“But SM still has us stuck here,” he says, leaning against the window frame. “We can’t leave even if we want to.”

“SM will be shut down soon,” Johnny reminds him. “Hendery said their operations are going to be dissolved.”

“But the government isn’t retracting our wanted status,” Sicheng sighs, weary, like he doesn’t want to argue this point either. “They’ll just replace SM with someone else to hunt us down.”

They all know this, of course, but no one has said it out loud yet. Most of their injuries from the fight have healed over the last few weeks, and they’re in a steady routine of gathering food, swapping night shifts, and fighting over the hot water in the shower. He finds it comfortable, but he also knew it was only a matter of time before people started to feel stifled, what with all of them living in the same four or five rooms. Sicheng, along with Dejun, Donghyuck and Ten all so clearly thrive in the outdoors. They can’t be cooped up here forever.

“Does Taeyong have any plan of where to go next?” Lucas asks, the game paused as he holds the dice in his hands.

The hideout has been a safe haven for Johnny after two years under lock and key at the labs, but even he knows that they can’t live like this forever. He’s been shying away from thinking about it, because the problem is that there doesn’t seem to be many good options for them. They’ll always be sought after for their abilities, whether they’re wanted by the state or not. They can never go back to the lives they had before, no matter how much they want to.

“Taeyong has been thinking about it a lot,” he admits. “There’s one idea, but it would be asking everyone to give up a lot.”

“What is it?” Donghyuck asks, eyes sharp. “You’ve been discussing this without us?”

“Not really discussing. Taeyong just tends to verbalise his thoughts a lot. I think he was planning to talk to you guys about it at dinner tonight, actually.” He can feel all their eyes on him. “You can ask him then. I’ve only heard his ramblings about the idea, really.”

“We don’t even get a sneak peek?” Jungwoo asks, leaning in close with a hand cupped around his ear.

“Nope, sorry. He wants to talk to everyone about it at once.” From the other side of the board, Lucas finally throws his dice.

“Do you think it’s good?” Sicheng asks, wide eyes boring into the side of his face. “The idea, do you think it will work?”

Johnny watches Lucas bring his first piece home with an excited whoop. “I think it’s the only thing that could work,” he says. “But it will be hard.”

“As long as we can stick together, I’m up for anything,” Yangyang says, leaning heavily on Ten. “It would be pretty nice to see the outside world again.”

“You’re literally the only one who does get to go outside all the time,” Ten complains, standing up straight so that Yangyang is taken a few inches off the floor as he clings to Ten’s back. “Taeyong loves taking you on the supply runs. Don’t complain.”

“Like you aren’t always sneaking out looking like the local cat,” Yangyang shoots back, and sniggers when Ten shifts into a big black panther, playfully biting at his hands in response.

Feet hit the floor on the other side of the room as Taeyong returns with Taeil and Doyoung. Bags of food weigh down their arms, and Doyoung drops his load to the floor with a groan.

“Dinner is here, kids,” Taeil says, smiling brightly at them. “Anyone want to come and help us make it?”

“Sorry Hyung, I have to beat Lucas at Ludo,” Donghyuck says, eyes trained on the board. “The others are in the bedroom if you want to go and nag them instead.”

“Jisung asked if we should wash the vegetables with soap last week,” Doyoung says, despairing. “Please don’t ask him again.”

“He’s doing his best,” Taeyong says, stretching his arms above his head. “How is he going to learn otherwise?”

“He can learn when we’re not trying to feed twenty-three mouths,” Doyoung says. “God, how did I get this gig?”

“You rescued us from captivity,” Lucas tells him with a grin. “And I’m a very hungry boy!”

“That you are, Lucas,” Doyoung replies, pointing at him. “Every day I think we make enough food for an army, and it still disappears every mealtime.”

Lucas puts his hands out, beaming, like he’s completely at a loss too. Donghyuck nudges him with the handful of dice.

“I’ll come and help if you like,” Johnny offers. “I’m losing pretty badly anyway.”

“Are you that much of a loser, Hyung?” Donghyuck provokes. “Backing out so easily?”

“Actually, I’m graciously giving Sicheng my pieces,” he says, standing and gesturing to Sicheng.

He looks down at the board, then up at Johnny. “You just said you were losing badly, though?”

“You’re welcome,” Johnny says, giving him a swooping bow, then turning to follow Doyoung and Taeil out of the room. Taeyong is waiting for him, smiling and looping an arm around his waist as he reaches the doors.

“PDA! Our parents are being gross!” Donghyuck yells, then proceeds to make gagging noises at them, so Johnny kisses Taeyong on the mouth just to spite him.

“Beat him for me, Sicheng!” he calls back as they leave the room and head down the corridor.

Cooking for so many people in such a small kitchen is a challenge in itself, and Doyoung’s favourite tactic is to put their massive pot over the whole stove and make a big batch of stew. Today is yukgaejang, it seems, as Johnny watches him place scallions, beef brisket, onions, and gosari out on the countertop.

“The trip go well?” he asks, dropping a kiss to Doyoung’s cheek and pulling out one of their chopping knives to start on the onions.

“Just fine,” Taeyong says, wrapping his arms around Johnny’s middle rather than letting him do his task unhindered. “Taeil was so excited to be in a store again, it was really cute.”

“Can you blame me?” Taeil says, reappearing at the kitchen door with Jaehyun and Sungchan in tow. “It’s been so long since I’ve been in one!”

“It still makes me nervous, taking you guys out,” Taeyong admits into Johnny’s shoulder. “The masks and the glasses don’t seem like enough when there are a few of us together. It feels like we could get spotted at any second.”

“Hendery said that an anonymous tip was sent in about you a few minutes ago,” Jaehyun says, leaning against the kitchen doorway. The room is pretty much crammed with the six of them, so Sungchan takes a seat at the little table and waits to be given a task. “Someone did recognise you at the store and sent a text to the hotline number. So many people text that number that it’ll probably get lost, but you’d better avoid that store again in the future.”

Taeyong sighs. “Another one? I don’t know how much longer we can get around this national manhunt.”

“The kids were just talking about that, you know,” Johnny says. “Our plan for the future. Some of them are getting restless.”

“Yeah,” Taeyong sighs. “I know. I think it’s time we move on from this place.”

“Just as I was getting settled,” Taeil says quietly, fiddling with the stove switches aimlessly. “I like it here.”

“I know,” Doyoung says, reaching out to stroke the back of his hair. “But we can’t spend the rest of our lives here.”

“We can’t go back home either,” Jaehyun says. “Sometimes I feel like we’re more trouble than we’re worth.”

“Then where else is left?” Sungchan asks, slumped against the wall. “If we can’t stay here but we can’t go home, what’s the other option?”

“I’m going to propose it to everyone at dinnertime. Just hold on a bit,” Taeyong says, sending Sungchan a kind smile. “There are still options for us.”

There’s a pause, and then Jaehyun says, tentative. “How would you feel if I decided to split off from the group?”

Taeil turns to look at him at the same time as Taeyong. “You want to leave?”

Sungchan sends his brother a withering look. “He doesn’t. There’s nowhere he would go. He’s just afraid of Ten.”

“Still?” Doyoung asks, picking up the scallions and placing them on the table opposite Sungchan. He gestures for Jaehyun to come over and start preparing them, like giving him kitchen tasks will make him decide to stay with them. “Ten’s meow is worse than his bite.”

“I’m not afraid,” Jaehyun says, rolling his shoulders as he sits down. “But we’re never going to get along. I don’t think I…” he trails off, staring at the knife Doyoung is getting out for him. There’s an awkward silence for a second, and then Taeil takes it out of his hand instead, moving to do the scallions himself.

“You’re still healing, Jaehyun,” Taeyong says gently. “We all went through terrible things to get here, and we each need to do what’s best for us to heal. If you think you need to go, that’s okay. No one’s going to stop you. But listen to the plan first and see what you think. It’s safest for you and Sungchan to stay with the group, and I’m sure Sungchan wouldn’t let you leave without him.”

“I’ll have another word with Ten, too,” Doyoung says, placing the first pieces of beef to fry in the skillet. “Yangyang has told him to behave more than enough, though.”

“It’s not his fault,” Jaehyun says, glancing over at Sungchan. “Anyone would act the same in his position.”

“Kun healed your burns less than a day after Yangyang died,” Johnny points out. “Let’s not judge everyone by Ten’s standards.”

“Why are we talking about me dying again?” Yangyang says, popping up in the doorway and sidling past Taeil to head for the fridge. Ten hovers just outside the room, eyeing up Jaehyun, and Taeyong sends him a pointed look. “That’s such old news. You’d think nothing ever happens around here.”

“Funnily enough, no one has died since you, Yangyang,” Doyoung says. “It’s not a regular occurrence.”

“Jeno ate some Pepero too fast last week and nearly choked to death on it,” Yangyang shoots back, reaching into the fridge for a can of soda. “That was pretty exciting!”

“And why are we talking about my standards?” Ten asks, crossing his arms. “What, is it so bad that I prefer Yangyang alive?”

“It’s more that you seem to want me dead,” Jaehyun says.

Ten raises an eyebrow at him, shifting his weight to his other foot. “I heard you from down the hall,” he says, a twist to his mouth, avoiding Jaehyun’s eyes. “You shouldn’t leave. You wouldn’t survive five minutes on your own.”

“Ten,” Doyoung says sharply.

“What he means is that he’s sorry for being a bastard,” Yangyang supplies helpfully. “He’s foreign, you know, I have to translate for him sometimes.”

“My Korean is better than yours,” Ten complains loudly, but he lets Yangyang lean up against him in the doorway, grinning.

“You’re not very good at using it, though.”

Ten sighs, rolling his eyes. “I’m working on it. Truthfully, I don’t think you’re a bad guy, Jaehyun. I’ll do better if you decide to stay with the group.”

Johnny watches the two of them look at each other with obvious discomfort. Yangyang and Sungchan share a hopeful glance, and Johnny is kind of impressed that Ten managed to swallow down his pride long enough to get that out. Perhaps news of a potential plan for their future has helped put things into perspective.

“Thanks,” Jaehyun says, awkwardly. “I’ll think about it.”

Ten nods, then immediately flees the room, a giggling Yangyang clinging to his arm. Johnny can hear him saying _wow, so you do know how to use emotional honesty!_ as they walk back down the hallway together.

“Well,” Taeyong says, clapping his hands together. “That was interesting. Can we get the yukgaejang finished before anyone else decides to have an awkward reconciliation in the kitchen?”

They have a few other interruptions from hungry hideout members smelling the food before it’s finished, but nothing quite so interesting as Ten and Jaehyun looking each other in the eye and holding a conversation. When the pot is finally finished, Johnny is in charge of taking it safely down the corridor and into the sports hall, and even he can tell that it’s a weighty batch of stew.

“Alright, Lucas,” Doyoung says, holding the door open for him. “Let’s see you finish this!”

“Hyung!” Lucas exclaims, throwing his arms wide and beaming. Johnny can see all four of his Ludo pieces are back at the home base, game won, as the other three compete for second place. “Challenge accepted!”

As the food is dished out along their long, mismatched set of floor tables, he can feel Sicheng waiting anxiously from his seat, sneaking glances at Taeyong. The whole Ludo group are giving off an air of impatience as they wait for everyone to fill their bowls, ready to hear Taeyong’s suggestion for their future.

“So,” Taeyong says, once he’s scanned the room to make sure everyone has a bowl full of food. The room quickly falls quiet at the sound of his voice, conversation dying down all at once. “I think a lot of people have been waiting for us to have this talk.”

“We know how babies are made, Dad,” Donghyuck says through a mouthful of food, and Renjun hits his arm. He still hasn’t heard Renjun speak a word since their escape, but he smiles more often these days, will join in on games with the other kids or whack Donghyuck for being stupid. It’s nice to see. He’s hopeful that he’ll be able to hear Renjun’s lilting voice again, maybe sooner rather than later.

“No baby-making talk at the table,” Doyoung says from Taeyong’s other side, and Donghyuck sticks his tongue out at him.

“I know some of you are tired,” Taeyong continues, smiling softly at Sicheng. “And some of you feel cooped up, or restless, or that you can’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. So I think it’s time we move on.”

“Move on where?” Jaemin asks. “This is the safest place we could be.”

“But we can’t live here for the rest of our lives,” Dejun says, his food sat untouched in front of him as he pays full attention to the conversation.

“Eat up, Dejun,” Taeil encourages quietly from his side. “It’s good food.”

“Thanks,” Doyoung says, and Taeil winks at him.

“I don’t see how anywhere else would be better, or even at all possible to move to,” Hendery says, seriously. “Even if we did manage to get abroad, you know that we’re kind of known worldwide, right? We could be recognised at any time, anywhere. Abilities like Yangyang’s and Mark’s are going to be desired everywhere in the world by all sorts of people. All of us have to live with the fact that we can’t escape our abilities, and that means staying in hiding for as long as we can.”

Taeyong gestures to Hendery with both hands. “That’s all completely true. This is our reality. Which is why I asked Shotaro if he could offer us a different one.”

All heads in the room turn to look at Shotaro, who is happily devouring his bowl of stew next to Yuta. He glances up at the sound of his name, cheeks full and eyes wide as he looks back at them.

“He can, by the way,” Yuta says. “He said he’s up for it.”

Shotaro smiles at them all nervously.

“Wait a minute, hang on,” Jungwoo says, chopsticks in the air as he puts his hands up. “I thought the last time he did that he lost his memories and his ability for months, then had to come back here anyway because of imposter syndrome?”

“That’s correct,” Taeyong says. “It’s not a perfect plan, and we don’t know how it might affect us if we go with him. It’s a risk, but also an opportunity. Whatever happens, it would give all of us a fresh start.”

“Shotaro told me that there’s a possibility travelling to another dimension might change all of us in big ways,” Yuta says, bowl resting on the table as he looks around at them seriously. “This isn’t a decision we can take lightly. He guesses that he only retained his ability in the first place because dimension travel is his power. That’s the whole point—he can go back and forth between worlds. But a lot of other things about him changed, and they seem to be permanent. For the rest of us, it could mean changing everything. Or maybe we don’t change at all. Who knows? He's never taken anyone else with him before. But he thinks he can do it.”

There’s a heavy silence around the table. Jaemin and Jeno are looking at each other, and Dejun is staring at Shotaro. Johnny himself hadn’t known that detail—that leaving for a different reality could mean giving up every aspect of his life as he knows it. It’s a lot to take in.

The quiet is broken only by the sound of Lucas slurping as he lowers his bowl from his mouth, licking his lips appreciatively. “That’s really good food, Hyung,” he says, looking at Doyoung sincerely. “Also, I’m down for it.”

“You’re—what?” Johnny laughs.

“Sure,” he says, nodding. “The different world thing. It sounds good. We would go together, right?”

“Yes,” Doyoung says, staring at Lucas. “All of us would go at once.”

Lucas nods. “Then we should do it.”

“How can you say that?” Chenle frowns. “Don’t you miss your family? Don’t you want to go back and see Hong Kong?”

“If I went to this other world, I would see them there, wouldn’t I? But I’m not going to be able to see them if I stay here.”

Chenle rocks back slightly, frowning at Lucas’s words.

“Things might be different,” Yuta warns. “Not just your powers, but your family, your friends. Your whole life.”

“It’s worth it,” Renjun says, and Johnny looks up to see him staring at the floor. His voice is cracked and small, because this is the first time he’s used it in weeks, but he has everyone’s willing attention. “To get rid of these abilities, it would be worth it.”

“I agree,” Kun says, and Johnny finds himself startled. Kun, who has arguably the gentlest, best power of all of them. “If we can be free to live our own lives, it’s worth it to make some sacrifices.”

Hendery is sitting back, tracking the conversation with his eyes as he bites down on his lip. Sicheng is sitting forward and listening intently, while Mark and Donghyuck are sharing a long, meaningful look.

“We don’t have to make a decision today,” Taeil says lightly.

“Of course,” Taeyong says, picking his bowl back up again, only a few bites eaten. “We don’t know what might happen if we do this, and it’s a lot to ask. Whatever your decision is, you can talk it out with others, decide amongst yourselves. We don’t all have to go.” He smiles a little sadly into his stew. “I’d like it if we could stick together—Shotaro says he can feel out for a world where we all still know each other. But ultimately, you should make your individual decisions for yourselves.” He digs his chopsticks in and shovels a big chunk of beef into his mouth. “Class dismissed,” he says, waving his hand and sagging against Johnny’s side. “God, this food is so good.”

Jisung sits forward to meet Jaemin’s eyes, who starts talking in a low voice with his usual entourage. He’s sure that if Renjun wants to go, all five of them will be convinced quickly enough.

Johnny finishes his own bowl in silence. Even though there’s the risk of a big sacrifice involved, he’s already made his decision. He wants to go to the cinema with Taeyong. He wants to be able to go on walks with Doyoung, or adopt a cat with Taeil, or kiss Yuta for the first time in front of a pretty view. He wants to take Kun on a real date, a nice meal out somewhere. He wants to see his mother and father, wants to go on holiday to the States, wants to go back to school and see his favourite bands on tour and get a real job. He wants a normal life again, and that’s something he’ll never be able to have if he stays here. His only option is to start again.

Several of the younger ones are in charge of cleaning up the plates today, but he sticks around at the table after the meal anyway, because Hendery can get overenthusiastic about stacking the plates sometimes. He’s quieter as he tidies today, though, lost in thought.

“You’ll give yourself wrinkles,” Kun tells him in Chinese, and Johnny is proud of himself for understanding it. Sicheng and Renjun had been teaching him the language back at the labs, and the lessons seem to be paying off. “Stop frowning at the empty cups.”

Hendery’s frown smooths out, and he spins around, plates precariously balanced in both arms. “They personally offended me, what else can I do?”

“Wash them out until they stop offending you,” Kun says, swatting at his leg. “Go on.”

Hendery winks at him, then swiftly leaves the room, and Johnny decides that he can’t be held accountable for anything that drops from his arms on the way to the kitchen. Kun meets Johnny’s eyes as he looks away from Hendery, then smiles softly, looking down at his lap. They’re the only two left at the table now, with Lucas and Sicheng helping the clean-up effort in the kitchen, everyone else escaped to their own antics or a second round of Ludo.

He shuffles down the table so that he’s sat beside him. “Need any help getting up?” Kun is still being cautious with his leg. Though the injury has almost fully healed, it’s still tender for him to put pressure on.

“I’m alright. I don’t have anywhere to be yet, so I’ll just stay here until I know someone’s wiped down this table.”

Johnny laughs. “That’s probably for the best. Sometimes I really do feel like a parent around here.”

Kun smiles, mouth quirking to the side. “We have good kids, though.”

“Sure do,” he says, looking over at him. The sun is setting outside, and the yellow light from the opposite window roams over his rounded features. “What do Yangyang and Ten think about leaving this place? Will they come with you?”

Kun nods. “Yangyang has the same opinion as me. It’s better to go. Ten is uncertain, but I think he’s mostly spooked about the idea of losing his ability. He’ll come to be with Yangyang, and for the chance to go back to Thailand again.”

Johnny stretches his legs out flat in front of him, resting back on his hands and looking at Kun. “Why are you and Yangyang so easily convinced? I thought you would be one of the most reluctant to go.”

Kun’s smile dims. “We have nothing tying us here, to be honest. We left our family behind long before we came to the hideout, so staying with the team is the most important thing to us. Our abilities are a heavy burden, too. We could do so much with them, but that’s precisely what’s overwhelming.” His shoulders slump as he hunches over his lap. “I wish I had the motivation to stay here and cure as many people as possible, but I know it would only drain me. I wouldn’t be happy. I know it’s selfish, but I want to go to back to culinary school. I want to open a restaurant, and I want to live a normal life in a normal apartment. I can’t do any of that if I stay here. Also, if getting away from SM and this world that wants my power so badly means I’ll never have to see Yangyang hurt like that again, I would do it in a heartbeat.”

Johnny tilts his head, watching him. “You want to open a restaurant?”

Kun’s face clears as he meets his gaze. “That’s what you got from that?”

“I never knew that about you. I’ll have to try your cooking sometime.”

“I’ll be back on cooking duty as soon as this is healed,” he says, patting his leg. “I’ve been missing it, even though Doyoung complains about the meal sizes every day now.”

“He complains about that even when he’s not on cooking duty. It’s impressive,” he agrees, and Kun laughs, and it makes him feel warm all over.

“What about you?” Kun asks. “What do you think about going?”

He looks over at the window, squinting into the sunlight and humming. “I think it’ll be tough to start living a completely new life, but it’s the best option for us all. It’ll open up so many opportunities for us, even if it means giving up our abilities.”

“What opportunities do you want?”

“I want to go on real dates. I want to own a cat. I want to study law. I want to do a lot of things that are impossible to do here.”

“We’re the same, then. We just want to get on with our lives again.”

“Does that mean you want to go on dates, too?”

“If people wanted to go on dates with me, I’d like to do that. Yes.”

“People? Is that people in general, or do you have someone in mind?”

Kun laughs, a little bashful. “Maybe a few people in mind. We’ll have to see how it works out, being back in the real world again.”

“I can say with confidence that everyone else wants it to work out, too. If we’re talking about the same people, of course.”

“I think we are,” Kun says, looking up at him shyly. “I hope we are.”

Johnny leans forward and whispers, “I definitely want to take you on a date, if that’s okay.”

“More than okay,” Kun smiles. “I don’t know how this is going to work, but I know I definitely want to do that.”

“Okay. Good,” he says, sitting back again, satisfied. “That’s my plan for the new world sorted, then.”

Kun laughs, sweet and light. It only cements what he already knows; that if he and the other five want to try at having a future together, they need move on from this place, the abandoned building they’re squatting in. At the very least, he owes it to himself to try for a new life after the past two years spent under lock and key. It’s only down to the others to realise that, too.

-

They give each other space to think over the decision, but Johnny is witness to several of the other boys coming to Taeyong to confide their worries and concerns in him over the next few days. Several of them come forward to confirm their willingness to get the hell out of here too, but it’s not brought up by the collective group for another week.

When it is, it’s put on them all very suddenly.

“Hyung,” Mark is saying, trying to shake Taeyong awake in the dim morning light of their bedroom. “Hyung, wake up, I need to tell you something.”

Johnny had already been awake, but he doesn’t move, watching Taeyong groan and roll away from Doyoung’s side to face Mark.

“Okay, okay, I’m awake,” he rasps, running a hand down his face. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Hyung, I’m really sorry,” he says, sitting up on his knees and drawing his hands together nervously. Taeyong sits up at his tone of voice, and he can see Renjun propping himself up on the other side of the room to listen in, too. “I’ve felt something coming for a few days now, but I couldn’t tell what it was—it was all vague and stuff, and I didn’t really know if it was a good or bad thing, everything has been super blurry lately—I mean, it’s always been blurry, but you know, especially since the rescue…”

“It’s okay,” Taeyong says, holding his hands up to placate him. “It’s alright, Mark. Just tell me what you know now.”

Mark takes a deep breath. “People are coming here today to survey the building. A group of professionals sent by the University. They want to know what they can do with it.”

Taeyong stares at him for a few seconds, hands resting on Mark’s arms, his eyes puffy with sleep. Then he buries his face into his hands and sighs, long and loud. Renjun is already shaking Jaemin awake.

“Wh-wha—” Jaemin mumbles, grasping blindly at Renjun’s hands. “Wha’s it?”

“How many people?” Taeyong asks.

“Not sure. Definitely more than two. Maybe four? Or six?”

“Jaemin,” Taeyong says, but he sounds like he already knows the answer to his question. “How do you feel about altering several memories today?”

Jaemin props himself up on one hand, blearily catching on. “Are people coming here?”

“Yes.”

Jaemin’s face falls, and he looks between Taeyong and Mark. “Hyung—I don’t think my ability will help us if it’s a group. We’ve always just had the odd visitor before, and it’s easy to confuse one person, make them forget why they’re here and what they’re doing, but if it’s several people…” he trails off. “It takes time to pick through a stranger’s mind. I wouldn’t be able to turn them all away quickly enough.”

Taeyong is nodding as he speaks, already thinking ahead. Doyoung is now awake on his other side, frowning around at the room with puffy cheeks, and Sicheng has stopped pretending to be asleep, sitting up against the wall to watch the conversation unfold.

“Renjun?” he asks. “You couldn’t do anything either?”

“I can’t change their memories like Jaemin, and I could only alter their motives for about twenty minutes, not permanently. I’m not willing to, anyway,” Renjun says, careful to look at the wall as he speaks.

Taeyong flops back onto his sleep mat, stretching his arms above his head and groaning. Then he sits up again, pushing himself to his feet and going over to flick the light switch. The fluorescent classroom lights blink on, and Yangyang groans, rolling over and burying his face into his pillow.

“It’s time to get up, everyone!” Taeyong says, tired, clapping his hands together a few times. “The electric bill is finally coming and your Dads can’t pay it, so it’s time for us to get out of this place.”

“The fuck?” Donghyuck grumbles, squinting into the light. “Can’t Jaemin make everyone forget bills exist?”

“Not this time,” Taeyong says, hands on hips. “What do you think, Mark? Do we have time to make breakfast and talk about this?”

Mark bites at his lip for a moment, then nods. “Mm. Think so.”

Mark’s timelines aren’t known for being the most reliable, but Hendery raises his hand in the air as he stands from his sleep mat. “I’ll see if I can track down what time the appointment is from the University’s intranet.” Taeyong clasps his hands as he passes as a thank you.

Johnny finally sits up, feeling strangely calm. It’s not like he expected something like this to happen, but maybe it was meant to. His life has never been quiet for much longer than five minutes since he manifested his strength—something like this was bound to come along sooner or later to push them into taking the final step together.

Kun begins making batches of pancakes as Yuta empties the fridge of all the yogurt and orange juice they have. Doyoung brings the bowls of fruit to the table, where the hungry hideout members begin eating as they wait for Hendery’s verdict. Kun has just managed to make enough for at least one pancake each (and wow, they _are_ delicious,) when he returns with a printout of an email.

“We have about three hours,” he announces without fanfare, passing the paper to Taeyong. Taeyong looks at it, scratches his head, then places it on the floor beside him.

“Alright,” he says, looking around the table, and Johnny can hear him doing a headcount under his breath to make sure everyone is there. “Here are our options.” He begins with one finger up. “We delay the inevitable and deter the visitors from entering the building, but that will probably give away our position and force us to move somewhere else anyway.” He raises a second finger. “We leave the building while they look around, hide until they’ve gone, and wait until later today to make our decision. We’re bound to leave traces of living here, though, so it won’t be safe to stay here for another night after that. Third option…”

“We leave today,” Doyoung finishes. “Shotaro takes us somewhere else.”

Taeyong gestures in his direction, looking around the table a little apologetically.

“That’s the best option on the list,” Johnny says. “There’s no point in putting ourselves at risk when this place has clearly been remembered by some higher-ups somewhere. Our time here is up.”

“I don’t know,” Jungwoo says. “Isn’t it too rushed to go right now? Because we’re afraid?”

“It’s not like we haven’t had time to think about it,” Sungchan reasons. “I think most of us have decided whether we want to go with Shotaro already.”

“I think so too,” Taeyong says. “Let’s see. Raise your hand if you’ve decided you want to start over in another world.”

Johnny raises his hand, as do Sicheng and Ten on either side of him. Sungchan and Jaehyun look at each other across the table, and Jaehyun nods, and then their hands raise too. All of the youngest members join in through to Lucas, and all of Johnny’s boyfriends raise their hands too. When he looks around, Hendery and Jungwoo are the only ones without their hands raised, other than Shotaro, who’s belatedly joining them all with his arm in the air.

“Jungwoo, Hendery,” Taeyong says. “You don’t have to come if you don’t want to. But please tell me you have a plan, here.”

Jungwoo looks at him, hard. “I do want to start fresh. I want to go back to normal. But I don’t want to feel like a stranger in my own skin again, Taeyong, it’s been bad enough since I got this ability. We don’t know how it will affect us if we do this.”

“Think about it this way,” Yuta says. “We’re pretty sure Shotaro will be able to retain his ability at the very least. If you hate it there, you can always just come back in a few months. Or go somewhere else entirely. We’re not tying you down. It’s better to have those options than to stay here and have no options at all.”

Jungwoo looks down at his hands, then up at Yuta. “You think?”

“I do. I don’t know what will happen when we get there, but it doesn’t have to be for the rest of your life. You may change, you may not change at all. We can deal with that when we get there, and we’ll support you in whatever you want to do.”

Jungwoo is silent for a few seconds, fiddling with his sleeve. Then he looks up at Hendery. “Fine. I’ll go if everyone else is.”

Hendery looks back at him, scoffing lightly. “Then I’d better come with, hadn’t I? Who else is going to watch your backs?”

“If you’re not sure—” Taeil starts, but Hendery shakes his head.

“It’s okay. It’s not like I have much to stay here for. I’m just wary of all these unknowns we’re stepping into. Though if we’re all sticking together, I suppose it won’t be that different from our life right now.”

“Maybe we’ll know each other through something that isn’t a life-or-death situation,” Johnny says. “Like a marching band, or something. We have enough people.”

“Or a group of explorers,” Lucas says, eyes shining. “Or! A dance troupe!”

“We could be the staff in a Lotte Mart for all I care,” Taeyong says. “The fact that you all want to come makes me so happy.”

“Oh, we get it,” Doyoung complains, throwing his arms around Taeyong’s shoulders. “You love us all very much. We love you too. The question is, are we leaving right now?”

Taeyong raises his eyebrows at Doyoung. “No time like the present. Get anything you want to take with you, kids, and meet back here in twenty.”

“Aren’t we doing a clean-up?” Johnny says. “They’re going to know that we were here.”

“It would be impossible to make it seem like no one has been here for years. We’ve kept it too clean for that, and Donghyuck has exploded too much of the sports hall for it to look natural again.” (“Sorry!” Donghyuck yells back from where he’s pelting out of the hall.) “It doesn’t matter if they figure out we were here. We should just take anything that we don’t want them to have.”

“I’m going to clear off my computer,” Hendery says, shoving a whole tangerine into his mouth as he stands and wipes off his hands. “Maybe leave them a nice message to find.”

“Don’t give them any hints about where we’ve gone,” Taeyong says, and Hendery shoots him finger guns as he backs away. “Though it won’t take a genius to guess what we’ve done when we all disappear from the face of the earth.”

“Are you going to go and say goodbye to your parents before you leave?” Kun asks. “You could, Taeyong. You deserve it, you know.”

Taeyong smiles at him, a little sad, and shakes his head. “No, I don’t want to put them through anything more than I already have. Though I suppose…” he trails off, looking at the door. “Hendery! Wait!”

Hendery comes skidding back up the corridor, popping his head around the door. “Yes?”

“Do you think we could send out some messages before we go? For those who want to reassure our families that we’re okay, we have nothing to lose by contacting them now, right?”

“Oh,” Hendery says. “Yeah, sure. Everyone can go ahead and turn airplane mode off and send what they like. We should leave pretty soon after that, though.”

More than half of the group hadn’t left the room at Taeyong’s prompting to gather their belongings, but they stand now to go and fetch their phones or pull them out of pockets. It’s not like they have many other personal belongings in the hideout; almost all of their clothes are shared, and he has a suspicion Yangyang and Donghyuck had only left so quickly to safely pack up the Nintendo Switch.

Johnny pulls out his own phone and looks down at the dim screen. “Don’t know what I should say, to be honest. Love you Mom and Dad, see you in the alternate dimension?”

“That about sums it up,” Doyoung sighs, lying on his back and tapping at his own screen. “After all this time, how are we supposed to explain everything now?”

“You won’t be able to explain,” Jaehyun says, watching over Sungchan’s shoulder as he rapidly types out his own message. “But let them know that you’re well, and not to worry too much. That’s the most important thing.”

“Hyung!” Donghyuck says, sprinting back into the sports hall again with Yangyang hot on his heels, Nintendo Switch in hand. “Yangyang just had the best idea!”

“Do you think, since we’re leaving and everything, that we could go and play outside before we disappear?” Yangyang says, eyes shining. “We’ve lived here for ages and I’ve never actually been out on the sports field! It would be really fun!”

Taeyong looks between them, hesitating.

“Oh, yes please,” Dejun says, looking up from his screen. “There’s no harm, right? Let’s do everything we want to in these last ten minutes on earth.”

“Come on, Hyung, please,” Donghyuck whines, clasping his hands together. “No one comes around here, and even if anyone hears us, we’ll be gone soon anyway.”

Taeyong sighs, waving his hand. “Fine, yeah, okay. Go ahead. Don’t run too far out.”

“Yeah!” Donghyuck exclaims, immediately turning and running for the sports hall doors. They’re locked and bolted with several different mechanisms of Jeno’s creation, difficult to unpick from either side, so he’s not surprised to hear a booming explosion take the double doors right off their hinges. From where he’s sat, he can see the sun now streaming into the corridor, bathing it in a new natural light.

Yangyang whoops loudly and follows him out, their voices becoming fainter as they start running around the field like wild animals cooped up for too long. He’s not surprised to see a lithe panther of Ten bounding out of the building after them. Dejun, too, walks to the door, stepping out to stand still in morning sunlight for a moment. Then he finishes his message, slides his phone back into his pocket, and runs down the front steps to join them.

Johnny looks at the text conversation he has open, blank and new. SM had taken their phones from them long ago, right after Taeyong’s first escape, but Hendery had given him one upon his arrival at the hideout. It’s brand new and Hendery-secure, but he had been warned not to contact anyone outside of the hideout with it. Now his Mom’s number stares back at him, ready and waiting, and he wonders what he can possibly say to make up for all the heartache he’s caused.

Several of the others are making movements to leave now. Chenle is pulling Kun carefully to his feet, the two of them following Yangyang and Donghyuck out of the building, Kun’s arm loosely over Chenle’s shoulders. Mark leans against the wall in the corridor, smiling as he watches them play, typing away steadily between glances. Shotaro squints down at his phone, then nods to himself, and stands to join the others outside too.

Johnny types without thinking. _I’m sorry for everything, and I hope you’ll live well. I don’t know when I can come back, but know that I’m safe and happy. I love you both. I miss you. Thank you for bringing me up well, and for being the best family I could ask for._

He rubs his eyes with the heel of his hand and sighs, hiding his face. There’s so much more to be said, but he can’t linger here for too long.

“Hey,” Yuta says from beside him, and Johnny looks up, smoothing his expression into something more genial.

“Hey. You ready?”

“I am. Are you?”

He looks down at the message again. It will have to be enough for now.

“I’m ready.” He presses send, and shoves the phone back into his back pocket. He’ll make it up to them properly one day.

Yuta stands, offering him a hand. “Then let’s go and join the fun ones outside.”

Johnny huffs a laugh, taking Yuta’s hand and letting himself be pulled to his feet. Yuta keeps his hand in his grasp as they leave the hall together, all through the hallway and out through the remainders of the front entrance.

Outside, Dejun has begun to make it snow, thick snowflakes falling from a cloudless sky. There’s already a thin layer splaying over the grass, glinting under the bright sun, and Johnny laughs at the sight of Chenle chasing Jisung with a fistful of snow. Jisung is laughing too, high-pitched and excited, and it’s the brightest he’s ever seen the boy be.

“You ever made a… what are they called? Snow angel?”

“Oh, yeah,” he says, pulling Yuta down the steps and dropping down to lay flat out in the soft snow. Yuta falls onto his back too, letting go of Johnny’s hand to swipe his arms out at his side. Johnny does the same, and the sharp cold of the snow sends chills down the back of his neck and bare arms, but God, he hasn’t felt this connected to the real world in so long. He sits up, picking up a handful of snow just to throw it in his own face.

Yuta laughs at him. “It’s nice, right?”

“It’s so good,” he says, standing up to view his handywork. His angel is big and clumsy and has a clump of snow missing from next to it, but the crisp air he can breathe in is enough to make him feel accomplished. It’s enough to know he’s finally free of locked doors and stifling rooms, can make something as simple as this if he wants to, however he wants to.

A snowball hits him in the back of the head, and he spins to see Jungwoo there, grinning like a madman. He zips away, but it’s not as subtle as he’d hoped, the snow spraying out in his wake. Yuta is already at Johnny’s side, snow in hand, and he throws a well-aimed shot at where Jungwoo is trying to hide behind Dejun.

“Oh, we’re doing snowball fights?” Hendery says from the doorway, before promptly being met with a face full of snow. Johnny looks back to find that the shot had surprisingly come from a giggling Shotaro.

“Alright, it’s on!” Doyoung says from behind Hendery, pointing at Shotaro. “You want snow? I’ll give you snow!”

Shotaro only laughs some more, ducking to pick up another load in his hands and running back when Doyoung starts heading down the steps for him.

“99s and younger vs 98s and older!” Johnny shouts, patting a firm ball of snow together between his hands. “It’s on! No man left alive!”

“Oh, so you want to go again, big guy?” Donghyuck shouts from way across the field, clumps of snow already littered in his hair and smeared across his clothes. “You’d better watch out!”

Johnny retaliates by throwing his snowball in a strong arc across the length of the field. Donghyuck backs up and out of the way, but it breaks satisfyingly over Yangyang’s head instead.

“You’ve got five minutes!” Taeyong is calling from the steps. “Then we’re going! Kun is exempt, and I don’t want to see any foul play!”

“Go!” Yuta yells, scooping up an armful of snow and stalking off in Sungchan’s direction.

Johnny is immediately met with a face full of snow from Jeno, who’d been sneaking up on him as Taeyong had talked, slyer than Johnny had given him credit for. Johnny chases after him across the field, managing to push him down and shove a handful of snow down his shirt in retaliation—Jeno laughs and yells and attempts to wriggle away, until Renjun comes to his aid by dumping a pile of snow over Johnny’s head. This leads to a Johnny-versus-the-world style brawl as Jaemin and Jisung come around to pelt him with snowballs too, and a giggling Chenle appears out of nowhere to pull at his waistband and shove snow down the back of his legs.

Jungwoo comes to his speedy rescue then, with Ten and Doyoung in support, and Johnny squirms away to try and shake out his sweatpants. As much as he’s loving the snow, feeling wet all over makes him feel a deeper kind of cold. He takes the opportunity to escape the fight and lumber over to where Kun is sitting on the steps, wriggling his feet and arms to shake out the last of the snow before he reaches him.

Kun is watching Yangyang and Mark clutch each other as they hide behind a wonky, half-made snowman, with Sicheng, Taeil and Taeyong aiming snowballs at them. He’s smiling, bright and real, and he turns all that joy to dazzle Johnny with when he sits at his side.

“I saw you get tackled over there,” he grins. “It was good of you to let them get away with that.”

“I think I’m too soft,” he says, shivering as he feels the back of his shirt stick to his skin. “If we get to do this again sometime, I won’t go so easy on them.”

“We’ll do this again,” Kun says, certain, pulling off his big hoodie and passing it over to Johnny. “We’re going to stick together, I know it.”

“Thanks,” he says, pulling the hoodie over his head. It’s slightly short on the arms, but it’s warm from Kun’s body heat, feels a little like a hug. “I hope you’re right.”

“And I’ll be able to join in next time,” Kun promises. “Do you want me on your side, or do you want to be beaten?”

“Oh, I definitely want to be on your side,” Johnny says, nudging him. Kun beams, snowflakes melting in his hair and clinging to his eyelashes, looking so, so pretty.

The noise of an approaching helicopter filters through the laughter on the field, and Johnny looks up to see where it’s passing way overhead. In his peripheral, he sees Yuta, Jaehyun, Sungchan and Shotaro pause in their own little battleground to watch it; Dejun, Donghyuck, Hendery and Lucas straighten up from their game to look overhead too, and some of Dejun’s low clouds quickly form over the field.

“As much as I don’t want to cut this off before I’ve had a go at Donghyuck,” Doyoung calls out, “I think that’s our sign to get going.”

“I think so,” Taeyong shouts back, shaking snow out of his hair and gesturing for everyone to gather closer together. “Is everyone ready to go?”

There’s a general call of agreement from the others as Johnny helps Kun stand up from the steps. Yangyang holds a hand out for his brother as they come closer, Ten in tow behind him, and Kun flashes a smile at him as they cluster together in the middle of the field.

“What do you need?” Johnny asks Yuta, watching him stretch his wrists out.

“The dome needs to be perfectly airtight for Shotaro to be able to take us, so just—everyone stay still, okay? I know that’s hard for some of you.”

“Got it, chief,” Hendery says, putting an arm around Dejun’s shoulders as they join the group. Opposite Johnny, Renjun has Jeno and Jaemin in each hand, and Jaemin is knocking shoulders with Jisung, who has Chenle on his other side. Sungchan and Jaehyun stand close together between Yuta and Mark, and Jungwoo is shaking Donghyuck’s hand as vigorously as possibly from where Sicheng and Lucas are cramming in on either side of him. Taeyong and Doyoung stand on either side of Taeil, and Shotaro is in the middle of the group with Yuta, eyes closed and breathing steady. Johnny looks around at his team, taking them all in like this, just in case it’s the last time he knows them in this way.

Yuta inhales, touching his fingertips together, and a shining dome appears over their heads. Dejun’s snow is still falling outside, making Johnny feel like he’s in a reverse snow globe—snowflakes slide against the sides of the dome outside and settle gently on the top of it, beginning a wall of white over Yuta’s silver shield.

He says something in Japanese, and Shotaro nods, looking up at the sky. Kun’s hand is still clasped in Johnny’s right, and he feels someone else’s slide into his left—it’s Taeyong, smiling up at him, something like hope gracing his handsome features. Johnny smiles back, heart high in his throat.

The air begins to crackle, quickly filling with so much tension that it feels heavy. It should be stifling, but then a hardwood floor spreads across the dome beneath them, and an image climbs up the walls around them. A clean, empty room, with mirrors along one side, just out of reach. It looks like a dance studio.

“Yes!” Lucas exclaims. “The dance troupe!”

“Oh, hell yes,” Hendery says, eyes glinting.

“Ready?” Shotaro asks, in sweet, accented Korean.

“This is perfect, Shotaro. Thank you so much,” Taeyong says, voice thick.

Yuta says something in quick Japanese, and then in Korean, “Last chance to back out!”

Everyone looks right back at him, and from where he’s standing, Johnny can’t see any reluctant faces. Taeyong scans the group too, and must come back satisfied, because then he takes in a deep breath and says,

“Okay. I’ll see you all on the other side, then.”

Yuta nods at Shotaro. Taeyong squeezes his hand, and Johnny finds himself meeting Doyoung’s eye—he’s smiling directly at him, something knowing in the upturn of his mouth.

He smiles back. As long as they’re together.

The tension in the air snaps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and here we are!! the end!!
> 
> i had so much fun writing this! i've been wanting to write a superpowered underground team sort of story for ages and going into a new fandom with so many kpop boys to incude was the perfect opportunity for me to try it out. writing action and team dynamics and superpowered capabilities was a big point for me, so i'm really grateful to people who left comments pointing out the parts they liked best! they're what make me feel like i've succeeded in my goal. i hope you've enjoyed this through to the end too :D
> 
> you can find me on twt [here](https://twitter.com/hope_boos) if you wanna enthuse w me!  
> you can also rt this fic and see the moodboard [here](https://twitter.com/hope_boos/status/1352714095255056388?s=20) if you like!  
> and thanks to [rachel](https://twitter.com/koyahyah) for reading my whole draft of this even though she doesn't know nct lol.
> 
> i'm glad i finished this tonight, i'm so gonna enjoy the svt concert tomorrow lol. not sure what will be coming next but i have a few things in mind. thanks for sticking with this one <3


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